


o morpheus (give me joy till morning)

by vuvalinis



Series: morpheus verse [1]
Category: Motherland: Fort Salem (TV)
Genre: F/F, I don't know what this is I just have a lot of Feelings, post-season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:48:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24737188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vuvalinis/pseuds/vuvalinis
Summary: Three days after her death, Raelle dreams of Scylla. It doesn't come as much of a surprise.Whatissurprising is that, in the dream, Scylla appears as clear and solid as if she were standing before Raelle in the flesh, and the first words out of her mouth, after Raelle’s name, are a frantic, “You’re alive.”
Relationships: Raelle Collar/Scylla Ramshorn
Series: morpheus verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1831897
Comments: 187
Kudos: 450





	1. Part One: The Mountains

**Author's Note:**

> This will be a three-part fic that I'm hoping to update on a weekly basis (Mondays) but honestly Who Knows, so please be gentle with me. I also took some (a lot of) liberties with what we know so far about the mythos of magic in this universe.

Three days after her death, Raelle dreams of Scylla.

It doesn’t come as much of a surprise. It’s true that Raelle hardly ever dreams—or hardly ever remembers her dreams upon waking—and it’s even more unusual lately that she manages to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time, always with Abigail sitting close enough to touch and watching her pensively. But Raelle figures she’s overdue. She’s been carefully _not_ thinking of Scylla for days, but it’s like trying to keep a lid on a pot that’s already boiling over. It was, she thinks, only a matter of time before Scylla trickled into her subconscious brain.

What is surprising is that, in the dream, Scylla appears as clear and solid as if she were standing before Raelle in the flesh, and the first words out of her mouth, after Raelle’s name, are a frantic, “You’re alive.”

Raelle has been through a _lot_ in the past few days—enough shit to make the whole girlfriend-tried-to-sell-me-out-to-the-Spree thing look like a minor inconvenience. She’s exhausted and scared. She doesn’t know what’s happening to Tally, doesn’t know if there are more Camarilla tracking them through the mountains. Doesn’t even know how she and Abigail are alive right now, much less how they’re going to stay that way. She sure as hell doesn’t know what to make of Scylla, or the fact that she looks so _real_ for something out of a dream. All she knows is that her exhausted, overwhelmed brain is poking at a wound that still, for all her claims to the contrary, hurts like hell, and she does _not_ have the energy for it.

So, she thinks, she can perhaps be forgiven if the words that fall out of her mouth are, “Uh, yeah, I guess so.”

Dream Scylla visibly shudders with relief. Raelle looks at her—really looks at her, in a way she hasn’t been able to in a long, long time. If it’s a dream, she figures, she’s allowed. Scylla’s dressed like a civilian, wearing clothes Raelle has never seen before, and although there’s no trace of her captivity left on her—her face is clean, and the collar is gone from her throat—she still looks tense. There’s something strained in her expression, a tightness around her mouth. But her eyes are soft, and they take in Raelle with a desperate kind of wonder. As if Scylla’s the one who’s dreaming. 

Raelle avoids her gaze. If she looks into Scylla’s eyes, she thinks she’ll drown in them. 

“I didn’t believe it,” Scylla says now. “When Anacostia said, I didn’t—“ She breaks off, studies something on the ground in front of her. When she speaks again, her tone is oddly formal, but Raelle doesn’t miss the quaver in it. “They think you’re dead. At Fort Salem, they’re saying you died. You and Bellweather. But I knew it wasn’t—I knew it couldn’t be true.”

“You knew, huh? That a necro thing?” Raelle asks, because she doesn’t want to let her mind linger too long on the tremor in Scylla’s voice, or the way her hands are fidgeting at her sides. Instead, she turns her head away to take note of their surroundings, appraising the landscape of her own dream. It’s the woods, she realizes, the woods outside of Salem Town. Where Scylla stole her away from her unit and kissed her with the taste of death cap mushrooms on her tongue. Where she’d laid her heart bare for Raelle (what Raelle _thought_ was her heart, bared). Where Raelle had realized she was absolutely fucking _gone_ for this girl: stricken all at once with an emotion she’d thought her mother’s death had stripped her of completely.

She looks at Scylla sharply. Because this is a dream, but Raelle’s aware of it, awake inside of it. Just like she’s aware that the Scylla she loved in the woods outside of Salem Town was a lie she should never have fallen for.

So when Scylla gives her a weak smile and says, “No. Definitely not a necro thing,” her voice heavy with meaning, Raelle doesn’t fall for it. The part of her that still loves Scylla like burning has been shoved down somewhere deep inside of her, and not even dreams, she’s certain, can touch it there. 

“Then what are you doing here?” she demands, letting an edge of anger into her words. “Because whatever you have to say, I’m not really interested in hearing it.” Even in this strange, lucid dream, the urgency of the waking world won’t leave her alone. The very last thing she needs is to be having this conversation, even in the brief respite of sleep. Even with a girl who’s just a dream. 

Scylla shrugs and shoves her hands in her pockets. Fireflies wink around her the way they did that other night, and the memory tugs at Raelle’s heart without permission. Scylla studies Raelle for a long moment, her eyes relentless, like they’re trying to memorize her face. 

“I know,” she says quietly. “And I’m sorry. I just had to know for sure that you were alive.” Her lips curve upward in a bitter little smile. “I’ll leave you alone now.”

Then she’s gone. There, and suddenly not. The swiftness of her absence jolts Raelle right out of the dream; leaves her cold upon waking, remembering another time when Scylla was suddenly, irretrievably gone.

~*~

It’s just a dream, of course. A very vivid dream about things, Raelle tells herself stubbornly, that don’t matter anymore. _Can’t_ matter anymore. Not when she and Abigail have bigger issues to deal with—first and foremost among them, not dying. Again.

There’s been no sign of anyone from Fort Salem since Alder’s transport left them four days ago. No one’s even come to retrieve their bodies, which Abigail doggedly insists isn’t a cause for them to worry. “Somebody will come for us,” she keeps saying. “Even if they thought we were dead, they wouldn’t leave our bodies to rot. My _mother_ wouldn’t.”

They can’t stay and wait for rescue, though. Not with the threat of the Camarilla looming over them. They don’t know if there are more enemy combatants in the woods, so they keep moving south, away from the mountains and towards the Chinese border. Abigail calls it a contingency plan. China is their ally in the Hague; the Chinese military will be bound by treaty to help them, to send them safely back to Fort Salem.

They move during the day, because the mountains are treacherous at night: Abigail in front, steely-eyed and determined and untiring. Always she keeps herself a step ahead of Raelle and her doubts, because that’s what a unit leader does. She navigates them, if inexpertly. She helps Raelle scavenge for edible plants, and doesn’t comment on the sudden proliferation of mushrooms everywhere they go. At night she takes turns with Raelle keeping watch: eyes on the gray line of the horizon, ears pricked always toward the trees. Raelle is grateful for her, even if she privately doubts that anyone’s coming for them; she follows her because she doesn’t have a better plan. And because sometimes, when it’s her turn to keep watch, she observes Abigail’s face clenched in sleep, and feels fiercely protective of this girl who’s become her sister. 

Funny how quickly things between them have changed. Nothing like dying, Raelle supposes, to give you a little perspective.

She doesn’t tell Abigail about her dream, though. Not even when the memory of it steals her away to distraction—the memory of Scylla’s soft eyes and that _look_ on her face. Not even when Abigail notices and asks her what the matter is. She could tell Abigail, she knows she could, but Raelle really, really hates talking about her feelings. Especially when it comes to Scylla. And anyway, she reminds herself, over and over again like a mantra, _it doesn’t matter_. It was a stupid dream. She’ll get over it eventually. It’s nothing she needs to pour her heart out to Abigail about.

But then Abigail brings up dream-linking, and Raelle has to rethink that last bit.

“I’ve been thinking,” Abigail says. It’s morning, five days since the fight with the Camarilla, and they’re packing up the pieces of their makeshift camp. “If we could get a message to Fort Salem, let them know we’re alive, they might send someone quicker.”

“It’s already been five days,” Raelle points out.

“They’re probably being cautious. They know the Camarilla are back, that they’re in this area. And if they think we’re dead…” Abigail shrugs, as if being presumed dead isn’t terribly interesting. “There wouldn’t be a need to rush.”

“Okay, but _how_ do we send a message to Fort Salem?” Raelle may love Abigail, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to start bullshitting her. They’ve already talked circles around their options—specifically, how they have none. “And what’s the point? Won’t the Chinese military help us?”

“Of course they will,” Abigail says testily. “I’m just saying everything would be a lot easier if we could reach Fort Salem directly.”

“But there’s no way to do that—“

“There might be.” Abigail looks thoughtful. “I thought of something last night, while I was on watch. Dream-linking.”

The word _dream_ stops Raelle cold. “Dream- _what?”_

“It’s low Work.” Abigail sniffs, some of that High Atlantic haughtiness seeping back in. “Like linking, but diluted—really diluted. It’s a way to give someone a message in their dreams.” She worries her lower lip between her teeth, heedless of the look of horror on Raelle’s face. “It’s low Work but it’s difficult. Controlling dreams is hard, and over this much distance, without a physical link—it might be impossible.”

Raelle relaxes marginally at this. “Never heard of dream-linking,” she says, forcing a casual tone. “But if you think it’s worth a try—“

“I do.” Abigail looks resolute. “I’ll try tonight. See if I can reach Tally and my mom.” Off Raelle’s questioning look she adds, “It’s easier with people you already have a strong connection with.”

“It is?”

“Well, yeah. Otherwise anyone could link with your dreams, couldn’t they?”

“Oh,” Raelle says. The day feels colder, even though the sun is shining with all its might. “Yeah, I guess.”

That night, as they’re camped down in the grass, Raelle takes first watch while Abigail dream-links. She studies Abigail’s sleeping face, watching for some outward sign that the dream-linking works while avoiding the thought that’s been sitting uneasily in the back of her mind since this morning. When Abigail finally stirs only four hours later—punctual to a fault when it’s her turn to take watch—Raelle barely gives her a chance to wake up fully before demanding, “Did it work? Did you link with Tally?”

Abigail rubs her eyes blearily. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think so. Definitely not with my mom, and I only saw Tally for a second. But she was—like she was when she left us.” Raelle nods; neither of them has been able to say the word _Biddy_ out loud yet. “I don’t think she saw me, though. She was gone so quickly.”

She looks so weary, so small and defeated. Raelle hates seeing her like that. And because she hates seeing her like that, and because she’s now afraid of what— _who_ —might show up in her dreams (and because she loves Abigail, but that’s hard, especially now, for her to admit about anyone), she tells Abigail to go back to sleep. Abigail, for once, doesn’t argue.

~*~

She can’t put off sleeping forever, though. And sure enough, as soon as she succumbs—

“Hi, Raelle.” 

Raelle turns around and there’s Scylla, sitting on the edge of a covered pavilion Raelle recognizes from the Bellweather wedding. She’s wearing the same clothes as before, and she’s alone, the pavilion empty at her back. Where in the last dream she looked anxious and relieved (and a little contrite, much as Raelle hates to admit that) now she just looks expectant. Her gaze on Raelle is steady. 

There’s absolutely no fucking doubt in Raelle’s mind, knowing what she knows now, that this is dream-linking. That this is the real Scylla, sitting in front of her. 

Still, she says, “This is a dream,” as if admitting that she knows would be some kind of concession. 

Scylla grins. It’s a shadow of that shit-eating grin of hers Raelle used to love. (Used to love kissing off her mouth.) “ _I’m_ not a dream, Raelle,” she says.

“Yeah?” Raelle’s trying really, really hard not to lose her temper. She’s lost it on Scylla once already and figures that, for all her faults, Scylla doesn’t deserve that again. But it’s been a really hard, really fucking _long_ week, and they’re no closer, it feels, to the Chinese border or any kind of rescue. The very last thing Raelle’s in the mood for is another cryptic dream visit from her ex-girlfriend. Especially now that she knows it _is_ her ex-girlfriend, dream-linking. “Then what are you, exactly?”

Scylla’s expression grows serious. “I’m worried about you,” she says. 

“So, what? You’re _worried_ , so you're just gonna keep invading my dreams? What’s the endgame here, Scylla?” Raelle emphasizes hard on the second syllable of Scylla’s name. There’s no satisfaction when Scylla flinches with surprise.

“I’m not here to try and make you forgive me.” Scylla takes a tentative step forward, which makes Raelle take an instinctive step back. Which makes her wonder what, exactly, the rules of dream-linking are. Could she reach out and touch Scylla? And would she feel real if she did, flesh and blood beneath her fingers?

Then she remembers she shouldn’t _want_ to touch Scylla, and her mood sours even more.

“I know I said I’d leave you alone,” Scylla continues. “And I’m sorry to have to do this again, but there’s no other way. I told Anacostia you and Bellweather were alive, but she can’t take that information to anyone else without them wondering how she came by it.” 

“Since when has that been an issue?” The idea of the Army coming to rescue them is tempting, even close to the border as Abigail swears they are. “I’m sure she got lots of information out of you about your Spree pals.”

Scylla doesn’t answer, just stares at Raelle patiently.

“Oh.”

Of course. Scylla was supposed to be transferred a week ago, around the time Raelle and her unit deployed. Not only is Scylla and alive, she looks too comfortable, too _whole_ , for Raelle to believe her waking self is rotting away in a Caribbean prison somewhere, awaiting execution.

Raelle studies her for a minute. “Anacostia _let you go?”_ she guesses, even though the words sound ridiculous coming out of her mouth.

Scylla nods.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s complicated.” This is shades of the old Scylla, the one who wouldn’t (couldn’t?) open up to Raelle. Her face shuts down, and Raelle’s fingers itch once again, traitorously, to touch her. To make that expression go away. “And it’s not important right now. What’s important is that you’re safe. Before, when I thought the Army might be able to get you out—“

“They still can,” Raelle interrupts, seizing on the idea. “You can have Anacostia tell Tally, Tally can pretend Abigail dream-linked with her—“

She realizes the flaw in her plan at the same time Scylla starts shaking her head. 

“Tally’s connected to Alder, now,” Scylla says. “Alder would know.”

“Right.” Raelle remembers it with jarring clarity: Tally’s youth draining away from her face while Alder’s features softened and smoothed. For all her training, she hadn’t believed herself capable of actually _killing_ —not even after the Spree agent she’d taken down at Citydrop. But seeing Alder feed off her sister, she’d known for sure. “What about Abigail’s mom? General Bellweather?”

Scylla shakes her head again. “Too dangerous for Anacostia.”

“Dammit, Scyl, what then?” Raelle’s so frustrated that she doesn’t even realize the nickname’s slipped out until it too late to take it back. Scylla carefully ignores it.

“We’re working on it,” she says. “We’re going to get you out. Just—hold on, okay? Help is coming.”

And she’s gone again, leaving Raelle alone in an empty pavilion that’s decked out for a wedding. It occurs to her far too late that she didn’t ask who, exactly, Scylla meant by _we_.

~*~

Under better circumstances, Raelle likes to believe she wouldn’t give this conversation with Scylla any weight. There is, of course, a part of her that can’t let Scylla go: that clings to love like it will save her, instead of what it’s already done, which is the complete fucking opposite. But she’s gotten pretty good at suppressing that part. She reminds herself that _Scylla lied, Scylla betrayed me, Scylla cannot be trusted_ , and repeats it until there’s no room in her brain other things. Things like the color of Scylla’s eyes, or the sound of her laugh, or the way she used to press her face into the crook of Raelle’s neck in her sleep. 

But as the days wear on—as the spring in Abigail’s step becomes more sluggish, and the terrain all begins to look exactly the same, and still, nobody comes—Raelle can’t help but wander back to some of the things she’d said. And wonder. Like who, exactly, is “working on” their rescue? And where? Scylla can’t still be at Fort Salem, but if she’s still keeping contact with Anacostia, it’s unlikely she’s slumming it with her terrorist pals in the Spree. Unless it _is_ the Spree that’s coming to extract them. But what do the Spree want with a couple of low-ranked soldiers lost in the mountains? 

And on the other hand: how can she trust that a single thing Scylla says is true?

She wishes she could tell Abigail any of this. Which is bizarrely out of character for her, and makes her wish, too, that Tally was here. It’s all wrong, just the two of them, and even though Raelle’s pretty sure Tally’s safe, at least, not knowing where she is or what’s happening to her hurts. She knows Abigail feels some degree of this too, just like she knows there’s something else bothering her today. She seems jumpy, on edge, won’t stop glancing over her shoulder. It’s making Raelle twitchy and cranky. 

“Abi, what _is_ it?” she finally asks, as patiently as she can manage. 

Abigail just shakes her head. “Maybe nothing,” she says, cautious. “It’s just…don’t you think it’s strange that we haven’t seen anybody else this whole time?”

She doesn’t say _Camarilla_ out loud if she can help it. Neither of them do. 

“Maybe they’re all dead,” Raelle says. “Maybe we really killed them all.” Even as she says it it rings hollow. A lie. There was so much blood and noise and confusion, so many partially obscured faces, the air so thick with dust and the smell of witches burning. Raelle can’t say for sure that they _didn’t_ kill all the Camarilla in these mountains, but it’s also hard for her to believe that that kind of evil can ever be completely taken down.

“Yeah, maybe,” Abigail agrees. By her tone she doesn’t believe it any more than Raelle does. “It just feels like there’s something we’re missing.” She pauses, and they both listen to the sound of wind rushing through the grass. A shiver works its way down Raelle’s back.

“Something just out of reach,” Abigail murmurs. “Something close enough to touch.”

~*~

Abigail’s too jumpy to let Raelle take first watch when the sun sets just a few hours later. She sits cross-legged in front of her, jaw squared, scourge clenched tight between her hands.

“Just go to sleep,” she orders when she sees Raelle staring at her, which makes Raelle roll her eyes. “I’ve got this.”

In spite of herself, Raelle falls asleep before she can think of an argument, curled in a ball beside Abigail with her head pillowed uncomfortably against her arms. 

Like every time before, she knows she’s dreaming as soon as it starts, but unlike every time before, there’s something different to the texture of the dream. Something that feels a little unsteady and dangerous. There’s no familiar surroundings—no surroundings at all, none that Raelle can make her mind hold on to—and Scylla is there but she’s standing much closer than before, and her eyes look the way they did when Raelle was thrown into that cell with her the first time. Terror mixed with relief mixed with something else, something ferocious and true that Raelle refuses to give a name to.

“Thank God,” Scylla gasps, “thank _God—"_ and then she’s cupping Raelle’s face, and Raelle knows she should push her away, shouldn’t let her do this anymore, but it’s the strangest thing: she can’t feel Scylla’s touch in the dream. She can see, from the corners of her eyes, the fingers framing her face, the thumb moving against her cheekbone, but it feels like nothing. Which answers her question about the mechanics of dream-linking, Raelle thinks, dimly, with the part of her brain not occupied by how much she wishes she _could_ feel Scylla’s hands on her.

She’s such a fucking hypocrite.

Scylla must see some of this written on her face, because she yanks her hands away as if Raelle’s face burns. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours—you need to listen to me, okay? Someone’s coming to get you, they have your location, but Raelle, the Camarilla—they’re closing in on you.”

A chill steals through Raelle, even though all this does is confirm what she and Abigail already suspected. Without thinking, she lays her hands over Scylla’s where they’re still cupping her face. She tells herself it’s to steady her, to make her slow down long enough to be understood.

“Who?” she demands. “Scylla, _who_ has our location? Who’s coming to get us?”

Scylla stares at their conjoined hands instead of Raelle’s face, but doesn’t comment on it. Just shakes her head. “There’s no time,” she says. “I have to go—Raelle, I know you don’t trust me, and you have every right not to, but please, _please_ believe me. They’ll be at the border if you try to cross into China, and I can’t—you can’t—promise me, Raelle, _promise_ you’ll wait.”

Raelle opens her mouth to—what? Promise her? Tell her there’s no way in hell she’s falling for this act a second time? She’ll never know for sure, because at that moment, Scylla vanishes, and Raelle jolts awake to Abigail shaking her shoulder none too gently. 

“Sorry,” she says, not sounding particularly apologetic. Then her eyes narrow. “You okay? Bad dream?”

~*~

After that, Raelle has pretty much no choice but to tell Abigail. Which is a really fun conversation.

“Let me just make sure I’ve got this right,” Abigail says, staring daggers at Raelle. “Your _terrorist ex-girlfriend,_ who tried to _sell you out to the Spree,_ has been dream-linking with you every night we’ve been out here?”

“Not _every_ night,” Raelle hedges.

“And you didn’t once think to maybe _stop_ her from doing that?” Abigail’s clearly trying to keep a handle on the worst of her temper, because now they’re friends or whatever. And Raelle appreciates the effort, but also, she’s not doing a great job.

“Abi, I don’t know how to dream-link. I didn’t even know it was a thing until you tried it with Tally.” Raelle shrugs helplessly. “The first time it happened I thought I was just, you know. Regular dreaming. How could I have stopped it?” 

“You could have told me it was happening.” Abigail presses her lips into a hard, thin line, and Raelle looks away, antsy with guilt. “You knew I could have helped.”

“I know,” Raelle says. “I’m sorry.” Abigail’s face doesn’t smooth out, but she does dip her head once, acknowledging, and Raelle takes it as permission to plunge forward. “But we have a decision to make, now that we know, and I honestly don’t know what to do.”

“I’m not making any decisions based on the word of a _terrorist,”_ Abigail says. It’s halfhearted. There’s enough of a moon overhead that Raelle can see her face clearly, and her eyes keep twitching, towards the tree line of the forest behind them. “There’s no reason to believe the Camarilla are nearby.”

“Except that you said earlier you felt like you were being followed,” Raelle points out.

“I didn’t say _followed,_ I said something felt _off—“_

They go back and forth like that for a few minutes, voices lowered even though if anyone were nearby, they’d probably still be able to hear. Abigail keeps looping back to the fact that the intel came from Scylla. “I’m not trying to be a bitch,” she says, “but you have a weakness where she’s concerned, and she knows that.” 

“I know,” Raelle says tiredly. 

Abigail ticks off on her fingers. “She claims she’s in contact with Anacostia, but that Anacostia can’t help us. She won’t tell you who, exactly, is supposedly coming to rescue us, but expects you to trust it’s not her terrorist buddies?” She throws her hands up, exasperated. “Explain to me what part of this screams ‘trustworthy’?”

“Probably none of it,” Raelle admits, mostly to pacify Abigail. Truthfully, she’s torn. She doesn’t trust Scylla, but she does trust Anacostia, and Anacostia was convinced that Scylla’s love for her was real. She remembers Scylla when they were dream-linking, frantic and desperate, touching Raelle on impulse despite everything that’s happened. That Scylla, she believes, would never hurt her.

But also: that Scylla already _has._

Abigail’s watching her patiently. Raelle appreciates it more than she can say: Abigail’s cold and hungry and scared in the middle of nowhere, but still giving her space, still letting her process, still keeping a respectful distance from this messy, painful tangle of emotions that Raelle is constantly wrestling with. This war between her head and her heart that has marked her relationship with Scylla since that day in the cells beneath Fort Salem. That day, she’d told Scylla that her love for her made her feel broken and weak. Now, she isn’t sure if that’s true, but it almost doesn’t matter. Not when her love for Abigail, and for Tally, constantly surprises her by making her feel strong.

It’s how she knows that, in spite of all the million reasons why she shouldn’t, Abigail trusts her. 

“The Camarilla are out there,” she says. She barely whispers the word _Camarilla._ “That’s a pretty safe bet.”

Abigail doesn’t disagree.

Raelle takes a deep breath. Thinks of Scylla’s face in the dream, her thumb tracing her cheekbone. Thinks: _don’t you dare make me regret this._

“If the Spree are coming to get us, we don’t know what they’ll do.” 

Abigail nods slowly, reluctantly. “Whereas the Camarilla will just kill us.”

There’s not much of a decision to be made, after that. (Raelle thinks, having already died once and survived it, it’s best not to tempt fate.)


	2. Part Two: The Spree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay time to get sappy but honestly, you guys, I've never done anything like this before in my life and your comments have been so so so so lovely and I'm OVERWHELMED so thank you so much
> 
> And now it's time for Scylla

Three hours before the Spree are due to return from their mission to China, Willa Collar summons Scylla from their safe house in Malden.

“I’m sure you’ve already heard that our retrieval team was successful,” she says in lieu of a greeting.

Scylla doesn’t reply. Just stands at attention, like a good little soldier, and waits to receive her marching orders.

A smirk plays at the corner of Willa’s mouth. It’s an expression Scylla has seen a thousand times before, but on Willa’s face, it’s all wrong. And even though it’s irrational—even though she has plenty of better reasons to dislike Willa Collar—it’s this, the crime of looking so much like the girl Scylla loves (while speaking about her so _glibly_ ), that makes Scylla’s jaw clench.

But still she remains silent. It’s safer that way.

Outside, the shriek of an incoming aircraft momentarily diverts their attention toward the open doors of the hangar. Scylla’s heart leaps into her throat even though she knows it’s far too soon for the retrieval team to have returned already. She steals a glance at Willa and sees a flash of disappointment cross her face, as well, before it smooths back into the cool, indifferent expression she always wears.

“There’s a job in it for you,” she continues. “ _If_ you think you can handle this one.”

It’s a challenge and a taunt, but Scylla doesn’t take the bait. She’s distracted by what a job for her, with the team that rescued Raelle and Abigail, might entail. Her heart is suddenly beating double-time. “Yes,” she says, much too quickly. “I can handle it.”

Willa raises both eyebrows at her. Not for the first time, Scylla has the uncomfortable sense that Willa knows exactly what she’s is thinking, and is deeply unimpressed with it. But Willa doesn’t say anything. She never does. Those eyes of hers—ice-blue like Raelle’s, but otherwise nothing like Raelle’s at all—do all the talking for her. Scylla sometimes swears she feels those eyes on her even when Willa is nowhere nearby.

There’s a commotion outside the hangar doors as the agents on the aircraft begin to disembark, shouting to one another over the wind from the propellers. It’s eerily reminiscent of Fort Salem, though this base has belonged to the Spree for over a decade. It was the Army’s before that, according to some of the other agents Scylla met at the safe house in Malden. None of them seemed to know how it was won, or if the Army even knows it’s still operational. Scylla knows that anyone from the Army looking in on the hangar bay would think _junkyard_ before _military base_ , but that’s part of what keeps them under the radar.

Willa stands up from behind her desk—which is really just a folding table pushed out of the way of the hangar doors. “I’m giving the Bellweather girl over to you,” she says. “You’re to return her to Fort Salem.”

“ _Return_ her?” Scylla echoes, incredulous.

“Yes. _Unharmed_.” Willa gives her a frosty look. As if Scylla might really be planning to get a few knocks in before dumping High and Mighty back on the Army’s doorstep. “She’s our olive branch. A demonstration of goodwill. If the Spree return Petra Bellweather’s daughter to her in one piece, she might be more amenable to our proposition.”

Scylla has her doubts about that. She’s never met General Bellweather, and most of what she knows about Abigail comes secondhand from Raelle. But the picture she has of their family is not one of people who easily concede to anyone. Especially not the Spree.

She bites her tongue, though. So many of her troubles, she thinks, could easily be resolved by just keeping her mouth shut. Maybe she wouldn’t even be in this situation. Maybe she’d still be at Fort Salem, and Raelle—

Raelle.

“What about Rae—what about Private Collar?” she blurts, throwing it all out the window.

Willa purses her lips. “She’s not your concern.”

“So she’s not going back to Fort Salem? You’re not returning her to her—”

“I _said_ she’s not your concern, Ramshorn.” There’s a bite to Willa’s tone now. She’s angry, and part of that anger, Scylla knows, is personal. “You failed to bring her in. Your mission with her is over. I’ve given you new orders, and you’ve assured me you can follow them.” She stares Scylla down, giving her the full blast of those eyes. “Can I trust you to hold to that, or shall I find someone else to take care of it?”

They regard one another for one unflinching moment. Everything that’s between them but unspoken feels very close to the surface, ready to bubble over. Sometimes Scylla looks at her cell leader and has to detach from the truth completely: that this person whom she despises made the person she loves more than anything.

Other times she wonders if Willa’s reasons for disliking her aren’t pretty much the same. If, in those moments, Scylla’s not an agent who failed Willa’s mission, but the girl who played with and broke her daughter’s heart.

The moment of eye contact doesn’t last long. They both already know what Scylla’s answer will be.

“Yes ma’am,” Scylla says, adopting a tone of lofty arrogance she doesn’t quite feel. “I can do it. You can count on that.”

~*~

She seeks out Anacostia.

After Willa dismisses her, she has two and a half hours to kill before the retrieval team’s ETA. It’s a gamble, whether or not Anacostia will be able to answer her SOS—they knew, when they made this arrangement, that it would be precarious—but the news of Abigail and Raelle’s return is too important not to try.

An hour later, she’s meeting Anacostia by the loading dock of a grocery store in Quincy. As usual, Anacostia’s wearing her civilian clothes to look inconspicuous, but there’s something disheveled to her appearance today, like she got dressed in a hurry. Perhaps it’s only noticeable because normally she looks immaculate, no matter what she wears. But it raises Scylla’s hackles, just a touch. If anyone from Fort Salem followed her—

“This had better be important,” Anacostia grouses. “I’m running out of excuses to duck out on Basic.”

She sounds like her normal self, if somewhat grouchier than usual. Scylla relaxes incrementally. “It is,” she assures her. “I just spoke with Willa Collar. The Spree have them. They’re coming home.”

Anacostia, as usual, betrays nothing with her face—or almost nothing. Scylla could swear she sees a look of relief pass over her face before it’s quickly drawn back into its customary stoicism. “You’re certain?” she asks.

“Yes. Intel came right from the top.” Scylla pauses. She’s not sure how Anacostia will take this next part. “They want me to deliver Bellweather back to Fort Salem. As a gesture of goodwill.”

Anacostia raises both eyebrows, tacitly confirming Scylla’s doubts about the plan. Anacostia’s doubted from the beginning that any of this can work—the Spree’s grand scheme to ally with the Army till the Camarilla threat is taken care of. But what Anacostia says is, “They’re sending _you_. To _Fort Salem_.”

Scylla just stares at her for a second, uncomprehending. Then— _oh_.

“Your boss trying to get you killed, Ramshorn?”

Scylla can’t tell if Anacostia’s joking (her tone, as usual, gives no indication), or if the question is sincere. Either way, she’s hit on something that feels awfully close to the truth. Stupid of Scylla not to realize that setting foot anywhere near Fort Salem is as good as asking to be recaptured. To be put right back on track for execution, only _ten days_ after escaping her fate the first time.

“Of course not,” she says. She can hear the lack of conviction in her own voice and knows Anacostia won’t be fooled, either. “The mission would be dangerous for any of us.” Willa Collar might dislike her, but stands to gain nothing if the Army recaptures her. Stands to _lose_ quite a lot, in fact, now that Scylla’s seen their base at the airfield.

Anacostia’s expression softens just a bit. “I know you don’t want to hear it,” she says quietly, “but I’m gonna ask you again: are these _really_ the people you want to be working for?”

Two weeks ago, Scylla would have said yes without hesitation. Would have rattled off a bunch of platitudes about freedom and liberation, which would have made Anacostia sigh and shake her head but ultimately leave Scylla alone.

But now, Anacostia’s put just enough doubt in her head to make her hesitate.

“You’re right,” she says instead. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Anacostia rolls her eyes. “All right then,” she says. “Tell me how I can help.”

Immediately, Scylla feels cut down to size. She hates throwing herself at anyone’s mercy—even Anacostia, who arguably is on level ground with her, given the nature of their arrangement. Still, her voice sounds infuriatingly small and weak as she asks, “Can you find a way to take Bellweather off my hands? Before I have to go anywhere near Fort Salem, I mean?”

“I can try.” Anacostia sighs. “It won’t be easy, but I can figure something out.” She gives Scylla a shrewd look. “You haven’t said anything about Collar.”

Scylla shrugs. “Don’t know anything.” She knows she’s doing a terrible job of sounding nonchalant, but Anacostia doesn’t call her on it. “They wouldn’t tell me.”

“The Spree are keeping her with them, then. With her mother.”

“Sounds that way.”

Anacostia shakes her head, equal parts impressed and disgusted. “You’re full of surprises, Ramshorn, I’ll say that.” Then, in a much gentler tone: “She spoke in your favor, you know.”

Scylla can’t help it; she whips back around to meet Anacostia’s eyes. “Raelle did?”

“Mm-hm. When they were going to take you away. She asked me to make sure they went easy on you. _She’s not all bad_ , she said.”

And it amazes Scylla, how this one little admission can take her breath away so completely. For a moment, she can’t speak. Can only stare at Anacostia, with a feeling raging in her chest that’s threatening to bring her to her knees.

She’d thought that Raelle’s anger had been the worst possible thing—how it burned up everything, including her love, and left Scylla with nothing in a cold, bright cell. Then, the news from Fort Salem—Bellweather and Collar presumed KIA—and that had been so much worse than the threat of execution could ever be. Scylla’s known for a long time that thinking you have nothing left to lose is a dangerous game, when there is always, _always_ something else that can hurt you. But still, she’d foolishly thought that it couldn’t get worse than this: Raelle dead, Raelle lost, Raelle’s body broken and lying somewhere in the Altai Mountains.

Knowing that Raelle might still love her doesn’t hurt, exactly. But it’s a dangerous flicker of hope, and Scylla won’t— _can’t_ —let herself go down that road. Where everything else so far has failed to, she knows that that will be the thing that kills her.

“Why are you telling me this?” she manages.

“Because that girl’s still protecting you.” Anacostia bores her eyes into Scylla’s. She’s back in drill sergeant mode, harsh and unsparing, and the little part of Scylla that’s still a soldier automatically straightens up and listens. “She’s still protecting you, but now _she_ needs protection. And I think the least you can do is help me do that for her.”

Scylla nods. On this, they completely agree.

“I’ll do whatever I can,” she says.

Anacostia’s face doesn’t soften, but she gives a slight nod of approval.

“I know you will,” she replies.

~*~

By the time Scylla returns to the Spree airfield, the sun is low on the horizon, and there are two aircraft visible on the runway beside the hangar bay.

It shouldn’t make a difference, knowing that Raelle is so close—not when Willa’s made it clear that Scylla won’t be allowed to see her. Not when Raelle still hates her. It’s childish, wishful thinking to believe that just because Scylla saved her life (just because Raelle tried to save Scylla’s), things will be different. Scylla knows this. She _does._

And yet. Her pulse hammers in her throat as she idles at the sentry post, waiting for clearance to drive up to the hangar bay.

There’s no one at the sentry post tonight, but there’s a trio of dark figures making their way across the field toward Scylla’s car. She assumes they’re there to clear her and let her through, right up until the moment one of them strong-arms a protesting second into the back seat of her car, while the third person shines a flashlight in Scylla’s eyes.

“The way over is under,” the agent with the flashlight says tonelessly.

“The way out is in,” Scylla replies, automatic. “What’s going on?” She tries to crane her neck to see the back seat, but between the dark and the commotion, she can’t see either of the agents’ faces.

The first agent successfully slams the car door in the other’s face. “Prisoner transfer,” she says, almost cheerfully. “Collar says you were debriefed.”

“I was, but—”

Whatever Scylla had intended to say is abruptly cut off by a sudden lurching in the back seat. She turns around, and there’s Abigail Bellweather: filthy and bruised and looking fit to kill, yet somehow still haughty. When she locks eyes with Scylla, hers go comically wide, and Scylla thinks that under practically any other circumstance imaginable, she’d laugh right about now.

Instead, she just stares.

_“Necro?”_ Abigail Bellweather spits. “What the _fuck—?”_

~*~

“Unbelievable,” Abigail says for the third time.

Scylla closes her eyes briefly. She can feel a headache coming on.

“I mean, you’re really unbelievable, you know that?”

“You’ve mentioned it once or twice.”

Abigail leans forward toward the front seat of the car, insinuating herself into Scylla’s space. Scylla effortfully keeps her eyes on the dark ribbon of highway in front of her. The sign up ahead says they’re barely through Lexington, a fact that only serves to increase the pressure in her head.

“You think you’re pretty damn funny, don’t you?” Abigail sneers.

Scylla shrugs. “They say you should follow your talents.”

Abigail snorts. “Yeah, I’m sure you’ve got all kinds of _talents_.” She says _talents_ the way you might say _syphilis_. “You sure had Raelle fooled. Bet the terrorists she’s with now aren’t as _charming_ as you, though.”

Her words are venomous, but Scylla doesn’t miss the way her voice cracks on that last sentence. She wonders, surprised, when Abigail started to care so much.

“Why do they want her?” Abigail demands. “Why couldn’t they let her come home with me?”

And Scylla feels a little unbalanced—in part by how frantic Abigail sounds, under all that uppity bravado, and in part because she doesn’t have the answers to these questions, either, and that scares her as much as it scares Abigail. So instead of another snappy retort, what she says is, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.” Abigail snorts mirthlessly. “Well, that’s just great. They clearly trust you a whole lot.”

“Her mom’s there.”

Scylla doesn’t know what makes her say it. It’s not as though she can’t handle a little bitching and moaning from Abigail (after _saving her life_ , thank you very much). The accusation that she tricked Raelle into loving her—well, it’s partly true, but a much larger part of it isn’t. Abigail believing that none of it was real is a small hurt, compared to the knowledge that Raelle thinks that, too.

But the insinuation she heard, that Scylla would ever willingly leave Raelle in danger—

“Her _what?”_

Scylla is suddenly exhausted. Bone-deep tired, the kind that comes all at once after days of running on nothing but adrenaline. Since her escape from Fort Salem, the Spree have had her all over Eastern Massachusetts, running errands. She can’t even remember the last time she had a full night’s sleep in a bed.

But she knows that Abigail won’t let up without an explanation, so she gives her one. “Willa Collar faked her death in Liberia two years ago. She’s been with the Spree ever since. That’s why they wanted me to extract Raelle from Fort Salem. To bring her to her mom. _That’s_ who she’s with now. Not a bunch of terrorists. Her mom.”

She expects the silence that follows. Enjoys it, even, for a second of blessed peace and quiet, before it explodes into something she completely didn’t expect.

“And you think that makes her _safe?”_ Abigail is practically snarling, more worked up than Scylla thought uptight High Atlantics ever allowed themselves to become. “If her mom’s alive, then she let Raelle think she was _dead_. For _two years_. And, what, after a couple of years being a terrorist, you think she suddenly _cares_ about Raelle again?”

“I don’t see why _you_ care,” Scylla shoots back hotly. She swore she wasn’t going to let this girl get the best of her, swore she’d do exactly what she was told and not complicate matters by getting involved. But turns out, she can’t even ride in a car with Abigail for twenty minutes without things getting personal and tempers getting lost. “You never liked her. _She_ never liked _you_.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Abigail shake her head and sink back into her seat. When she sneaks a glance in the rearview mirror, she can see Abigail staring daggers at her.

“No,” Abigail says. “No, see, that’s where you’re wrong, Ramshorn. Raelle’s my sister. I love her. I _died_ for her in those mountains, and you know what? I’d do it again.” She laughs once, bitterly, and turns her gaze away from Scylla in the mirror as if the sight of her is too disgusting to bear. “I guess it makes sense that you, of all people, wouldn’t understand what that means.”

~*~

As promised, Anacostia is already waiting when Scylla pulls into an empty service station near the off-ramp to Salem Town. She’s in full uniform, standing at attention by an unmarked car; and though her expression is impassive as always, Scylla has gotten pretty good at reading between the lines. She comes dangerously close to smiling when Abigail stumbles out of the back seat of the car.

“Private Bellweather,” she says, shaking her head. “Am I glad to see you.”

“The Spree still have Raelle,” Abigail says, completely ignoring the sentiment. “What are we doing about that?” She makes a point of ignoring Scylla, who’s leaning against the hood of her car, keeping herself at a distance from their reunion. But Scylla can see her face as she petitions Anacostia. How scared she still looks, how frantic. She actually _does_ care about Raelle, and that might possibly be the strangest thing about this entire day.

“We’re working on it,” Anacostia says smoothly. “But for right now, you and I need to go. I need to debrief you on your cover story and get you back to base before anyone notices me gone.” She jerks her chin in the direction of her car. “Get in.”

“Wait.”

Scylla doesn’t even realize she’s spoken until Anacostia and Abigail both turn to look at her—Anacostia with confusion, Abigail dripping disdain.

_Again_ with the not keeping her mouth shut. “I just.” Scylla swallows. There’s a question that’s been eating at her for the whole car ride, a question she didn’t think she could bear to ask. Now, as Abigail’s slipping away, she thinks it’s might be more unbearable not to know.

“Is she all right?”

Scylla tries to weigh down her words with all the things she can’t express to Abigail. She doesn’t think her apologies would be worth much (doesn’t know if she’s a big enough person to actually _apologize_ to Abigail Bellweather in the first place), so she tries to convey them in her words. And she isn’t expecting much in return—she’s certain Abigail has a cutting retort at the ready—but to her surprise, Abigail deflates a little.

“Yeah,” she says. All the malice has drained from her voice. She just sounds tired, as tired as Scylla feels. “Yeah, she’s all right. Or she was, when I left.”

Scylla nods. “Thank you,” she manages. Her heart picks up the rhythm, _she’s all right, she’s all right, she’s all right_ , till it’s all she can hear, rushing in her ears like the sound of the sea.

Abigail gets in the car without another glance at either one of them, leaving Scylla alone with Anacostia. They both lean against their respective cars, saying nothing for a moment.

“Thank you,” Scylla says again, “for helping.”

Anacostia waves her off. “Wouldn’t make much sense for me to bust you out just to let them catch you again.”

“So what happens now?”

“Honestly?” Anacostia exhales heavily. “I don’t know. The Spree returned Abigail. They’ve made their move. I guess our next move will depend on what the Spree want in return.”

“An alliance.”

“That won’t be all. You mark my words. They’ll have conditions.”

“I don’t know what they are,” Scylla says quickly. It’s suddenly tremendously important to her, in a way it never was before, that Anacostia believes her. “I don’t know any more right now than you do.”

“I know.” Anacostia startles her by placing her hand, just for a second, on Scylla’s shoulder. She removes it as quickly as it takes for Scylla’s foggy, sleep-deprived brain to process what’s happening, but the warmth lingers. Scylla gapes up at her, but Anacostia’s face is unreadable, that smooth, careful mask firmly back in place.

“I’ll be in touch,” she says, and climbs into the driver’s seat of the car. The windows are tinted, so that Scylla can’t see either of them once the doors are shut; but she watches as the car peels out of the service station and onto the highway, trying all the while to remember when the last time was that someone touched her gently.

~*~

Sleep doesn’t come easily, after that.

Scylla’s exhausted, to be sure—so much so that she barely makes it past Lynn before the weight of her eyelids becomes too dangerous to ignore. With the mission complete, the full weight of everything that’s happened today settles on her, and she knows she won’t make it safely back to Malden tonight. Instead, she finds another service station—this one cheerfully lit up on the inside, glowing like a beacon in the middle of the highway—and pulls into the furthest, darkest corner of the parking lot.

But Scylla and sleep have never been close allies. Not since the Army murdered her parents. Scylla remembers almost nothing of the days and months after it happened, but she remembers there were nightmares, an endless stream of them, trickling through her sleeping mind night after night. They eventually stopped, but by that point Scylla was restless, mistrustful of switching off her brain completely. When she manages to sleep at all, it’s a fragile thing: easily undone by the sound of a footstep outside her door, or Raelle turning over in her sleep. Sometimes, to Raelle’s great amusement, she kicks and thrashes, as well.

_Who were you fighting?_ Raelle had teased her once, when she woke in a cold sweat with the bedsheets on the floor and Raelle’s warm breath on her neck.

_Can’t remember_ , Scylla had replied. _My inner demons, maybe_. Turning it into a joke. Smiling so Raelle wouldn’t pry.

_Well then,_ Raelle had said, brushing the sweat-damp hair out of Scylla’s eyes. _I feel very well protected from your inner demons._

If only that had been true.

Scylla twists uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. There is something she knows she could do. Something that won’t necessarily bring about sleep—not real sleep, anyway—but would give her peace of mind in another way. Something she could do, but shouldn’t. Not after she promised herself, promised _Raelle_ , she’d leave her alone.

It would be selfish and unnecessary to dream-link with Raelle now. Before, when Raelle’s life was in danger, it was one thing. Now, Raelle’s safe, and Scylla knows that that should be the end of it. She has no place in Raelle’s story anymore, and the worst is that _she_ wrote herself out.

But something Abigail said earlier won’t leave her alone. Something about whether or not Raelle is really safe at all, with Willa.

It’s a flimsy excuse, but Scylla finds she doesn’t really care. She shifts to a more comfortable position and touches her finger to her temple, tracing the rune for dream-linking against her skin. She’s falling under before she has the chance to convince herself she shouldn’t.

~*~

This time, she’s dreaming of a tree.

A lifetime ago, when Scylla’s mother taught her dream-linking, she’d said it was an inexact piece of Work. Not all of it was completely within the dreamer’s control, and the landscape of the dream could shift and change according to its own mysterious set of rules. Nor did it often present itself in the same way to both dreamers. “You aren’t dreaming the same dream _together_ so much as you’re bumping up against each other’s dreams,” she’d explained. “You have to find the places where they fit together, and make that your common ground.”

Scylla remembers copying the rune over and over with a pencil on a piece of butcher paper, till her mother was satisfied she’d never forget. Dream-linking, for them, was a safety measure, a fallback for if they were ever separated and needed to find each other. She thinks it’s not so different from what she’s trying to do here with Raelle.

Raelle, who she can now see is already here with her, under the boughs of the tree. _Their_ tree: their old meeting place, at the edge of the forest, where the manicured grounds of Fort Salem begin to grow wild. She’s tucked up against the tree’s protruding roots, and when she looks up at Scylla, her face registers no surprise.

But the _look_ on her face makes Scylla’s breath catch. Raelle’s eyes are red and swollen, and she’s cradling her knees to her chest like she doesn’t trust herself not to fly apart at the seams. Her mouth is downturned in a way that’s all too familiar, taking Scylla right back to the last time they saw each other in the cells beneath Fort Salem.

She’s certain, then, that this was a mistake. She has no right to be here, and, as suspected, was incredibly selfish to have come in the first place.

But then Raelle’s voice startles her:

“Did you know?”

There’s no bite to her words. No anger and no betrayal. Just an awful, hollow brokenness that’s so much worse than anger would have been. Scylla finds herself almost wishing Raelle would scream at her—anything but this grief that Scylla can’t soothe.

Sometimes, at Fort Salem, Raelle would fall into moods like this. Something would happen to make her grief for her mother feel fresh all over again—someone’s careless remark (usually Abigail’s), or her mother’s old deployment letters. Even in the very beginning, when Scylla had no intention of taking things too far with her, there was something about Raelle’s pain that made her feel irresponsibly tender. In part it was the familiarity of this grief, which Scylla herself knew too well; but part of it was also knowing that Raelle never let anyone but Scylla see her broken. The privilege of seeing someone fall apart, and then getting to put them back together. Scylla remembers cradling Raelle’s head in her lap and running her fingers through her hair, over and over again, as if her hands were strong enough to draw the pain away from her body.

So it’s strange to be so close to her when she’s hurting, but still so far away.

She sees Raelle looking at her expectantly and jolts back to the present. Slowly, as if she’s approaching a skittish animal, Scylla lowers herself onto the ground beside Raelle, keeping a safe distance between them.

“No,” she says gently. “I didn’t. Not when we were—not till after you were sent to China.”

Raelle ducks her head, examining the dirt between her boots. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice wobbles, but still, there’s no anger. No accusation, either, though Scylla knows she deserves one. “All those times you dream-linked with me, why didn’t you say anything?”

Scylla considers the question thoughtfully before she answers. Honesty doesn’t come naturally to her. It’s a little easier now before Raelle came into her life—came into her life and told her she’d love her no matter who she’d been—but still, there’s a danger that comes with being that exposed to another person.

Raelle’s the only person who’s ever made Scylla want to take that risk.

“Lots of reasons,” she says at last. “I didn’t want to add to your burden. Not when you were already in so much danger. And I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” She sneaks a look at Raelle, who’s still fixated on the ground. “That you would think I was trying to hurt you again.”

Raelle nods slowly.

“Raelle.” Scylla moves closer, slowly. “I know it doesn’t mean much, not now, but if I’d known from the very beginning—things would have been a lot different.”

Raelle finally turns her head up to face her. “What do you mean?” she asks, and Scylla notices that she’s moving closer too, bowing her body toward Scylla’s in a way that’s both guarded and familiar. Her eyes, which always look bluer after she’s been crying, are fairly blazing. Scylla has to look away.

“My mom died too,” she says. “That kind of pain, I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. If I’d known what your mom was doing, who she was—”

“You’d, what?” Raelle laughs. It comes out sounding more like she’s choking. “Quit the Spree just because my mom did something awful to me?”

On pure instinct, ignoring the inner voice that questions whether or not she _should_ , Scylla reaches out and tips Raelle’s chin up so she can look her in the eyes. She knows dream-linking doesn’t extend to touch, that Raelle can’t actually _feel_ her hands on her, but the moment feels intense anyway. Raelle seems to be holding her breath, watching her.

“I don’t know what I would have done,” Scylla says, holding Raelle’s gaze. “And I know nothing I can say will excuse what I did. But I know that you changed things for me, Raelle. You changed everything.” She has to swallow hard before she can continue. “And I never would have let you be in that kind of pain. Not if it was for a lie.”

Raelle’s silent. She doesn’t break eye contact, doesn’t push Scylla’s hand away, but she doesn’t say anything, either.

But when Scylla tries to remove her hand—certain that she’s gone about this all wrong again—Raelle grabs it and holds it, cupping both their hands over her face. And it’s the strangest thing, touching Raelle but feeling nothing from it, but it doesn’t distract Scylla for long. Because then:

“I’m sorry, Scyl.”

It’s about the last thing she expected Raelle to say. She shakes her head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I do, though.” Raelle shrugs. “You hurt me so much, Scyl, but I hurt you, too. I shouldn’t have left you the way that I did.”

She means in the cells beneath Fort Salem. “You had every right to be angry. You still do. I’ve made—terrible mistakes.”

“But you meant what you said.” Raelle looks away at last, gently dropping Scylla’s hand from her face. She’s always hated these big emotional talks, but Scylla doesn’t mind. “When you said—”

“What I felt for you was real,” Scylla finishes. “It was. It _is_.”

Raelle exhales, long and slow.

“Where are you, right now?” she asks. “In the real world, I mean.”

“Sleeping in my car. On my way to a safe house. Where are you?”

“The airfield, with my mom.” Raelle pauses. “I think—I think I’m going to stay with her a while.”

“With the Spree?”

“With my mom,” Raelle repeats. “For now, I mean, a few days—or longer, maybe. I don’t know.” She looks so confused as she says it, so _helpless_. Scylla thinks it would be so, so easy, so _natural_ , to pull her into her: to rest Raelle’s head on her shoulder and run her hand over the curve of her spine. But there’s something happening here, something she’s afraid will shatter if she makes one wrong move. So she does nothing.

“I thought…I had to at least hear what she had to say.” Raelle bites her bottom lip and steals a glance at Scylla. “And then I thought, if I could do that for her…”

That dangerous hope-flicker lights up Scylla’s chest once more. In the bubble of the dream-link, it doesn’t feel quite as life-threatening. But Scylla knows it’s still dangerous.

“I won’t see you for a while, then” she says. “Will I?”

Raelle shakes her head. “I don’t think so.” The tiniest smile pricks up the corners of her mouth. “I don’t think my mom likes you much.”

Scylla grins. “No,” she agrees, “I don’t think she does.”

It’s quiet between them, then. A peaceful quiet. No weight of things unspoken, no anger, and no urgency. It’s not, Scylla thinks, like it was before, with them. In some ways, it might be something better.

“You could visit me,” Raelle says at last. “Like this. In dreams.” She hesitates. “I mean, if you wanted.”

Carefully, Scylla asks, “Is that what _you_ want?”

“Yeah.” Raelle nods. “Yeah, I think I do.”

And even though she knows Raelle won’t feel it—even though it’s maybe it’s too soon for this, even though the hope Scylla felt before as a flicker is _roaring_ , burning her up from inside—she reaches over and takes her hand.

“I will,” she says.

~*~

It’s still early in the morning when Scylla pulls up to the safe house in Malden, but already, there’s a girl sitting out on the front stoop waiting.

Scylla’s never seen her before, but of course, that doesn’t mean anything. It could be someone she knows wearing a different face. _She_ could be someone different in a borrowed face, for all they know. It’s confusing, which is why they need the password.

“The way under is over,” she recites, breathless. She feels lighter than air. She feels like she could sleep for the next twelve hours, and wake just in time to see Raelle again.

The girl on the stoop looks up but doesn’t quite meet Scylla’s eye. She glances at something just over Scylla’s left shoulder, then says, “Go ahead.”

Scylla barely has time to wonder what she means before everything goes dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if any of this makes sense geographically. my family's originally from eastern mass (my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother was actually one of the women hanged as a witch in salem, AND NOW U KNOW) but I only know place names and not whether they're, like. close to each other. 
> 
> come say hi to me on Tumblr @vuvalinis and THANK YOU ALL AGAIN for being so nice. it's really genuinely a highlight of my day reading all your comments and I appreciate all of them so much


	3. Part Three: The Bomb

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may have noticed that this fic is now four parts instead of three. I made that decision fairly recently—this one had already gotten out of hand in length, and there were still a lot more plot points that needed to be covered in order to tell the story I want to tell. So we'll have a fourth part next week (Monday EST) to wrap us up.

Three nights pass, but Scylla doesn’t come.

The first night, Raelle chalks it up to Scylla giving her space. Which, in all honesty, Raelle could probably use right about now—even, and perhaps especially, from Scylla. But she can’t bring herself to appreciate that fact. She’s annoyed, for reasons she doesn’t completely understand; so instead, she tosses and turns on her bed in the Spree safe house, restless and agitated, until getting up becomes unavoidable.

She’s on edge for the whole rest of that day, to the point where her mother finally says something about it.

“Something’s bothering you,” she announces, matter-of-fact. It’s such a _mom_ thing to say—the first purely _mom_ thing Raelle has heard her say in years—and it briefly disarms her. She almost forgets to glare at Willa when she answers.

“Maybe I’m just a little _tired_ of people treating me like a bomb that’s about to go off,” she snaps. Which, okay, technically she _is_. But Raelle isn’t thinking of the Spree agents, with their nervous glances and their weapons at the ready, when she says it.

The second night Scylla doesn’t come, though—that drains Raelle completely of all her irritation, making room for something much, much worse. When Raelle wakes up in the morning with the sun in her eyes and no memory of being with Scylla the previous night, she feels cold panic slip into her veins. Even if Scylla wanted to give her space, Raelle’s positive she wouldn’t stay away _this_ long. Not when things were getting better between them. Not after Raelle _asked_ her to dream-link.

She goes through the day only half present, walking into things and accidentally ignoring most of the people who speak to her. Her mind keeps a steady stream of scenarios running in the meantime: Scylla is on an op and hasn’t been able to sleep for days. Scylla is undercover, and dream-linking could somehow blow it. Scylla is deployed in a time zone several hours ahead, and is trying to dream-link at times when Raelle is awake.

Scylla is captured. Scylla is hurt.

(Scylla never meant all those promises she made.)

It’s too much. It’s too fucking much, not least of all because, at some point, this whole thing with Scylla and the dreams stopped reminding Raelle of heartbreak and started reminding her of home. There’s a storm constantly raging around her, full of witch hunters and terrorist cells and mothers returned from the dead; full of Abigail being dragged away from her screaming, and Tally turned old and brittle before her eyes. But there’s also Scylla, in the midst of it all, reaching for Raelle’s hand beneath the boughs of their tree at Fort Salem. Scylla, with her eyes as calm and blue as the sea in the eye of a storm.

So when the third night comes and goes, and Raelle wakes up with the weight of Scylla’s absence sitting heavy on her chest once more, she does the one thing she swore to herself she wouldn’t:

She goes to talk to her mother.

~*~

Willa’s out back with a group of new recruits when Raelle arrives at the airfield. She’s standing off to the side of the training paddock, watching as one of her lieutenants leads the trainees through windstrike drills: spine pulled straight, hands behind her back, face unreadable. Very much the image of a general coolly surveying her troops. Completely unrecognizable from the woman Raelle called _Mom_.

When she sees Raelle approaching, though, her demeanor softens, just a bit. She loosens her posture and unclasps her hands, twitches her lips up in a hopeful smile. Closer to the mother Raelle remembers, but only in the affectation of her body. There’s something hard and cold that lives in Willa Collar’s eyes now, which Raelle doesn’t trust, and which never goes away.

“I need your help,” she says bluntly.

Willa blinks owlishly for a second, then narrows her eyes. “What’s the matter?” she asks, matching Raelle’s tone. All trace of softness gone in an instant: it’s been like this between them for days. When Raelle doesn’t respond to her maternal advances, Willa simply stops making them; and Raelle, accustomed to always being the most stubborn person in the room, is forced to remember where she learned that from.

Raelle hesitates before answering. She rolls the words around in her mouth, trying to find some permutation of them that won’t sound like a confession. That’s something she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to give.

But Scylla, as usual, renders her helpless. The idea of spending another day worrying and wondering about her is unbearable.

“One of your agents,” she says at last. “Scylla Ramshorn. I know she’s been working for you. I want to know where she is.”

Her mother gives her a hard, assessing look. “Scylla Ramshorn,” she repeats.

“Yes.”

Willa sighs deeply. Her lieutenant glances in their direction, and Willa signals to her, indicating the airstrip behind them.

“Walk with me,” she instructs Raelle.

They cut through the training paddock in silence, Willa keeping a few purposeful strides ahead of Raelle. This early in the morning, there’s not much activity at the airfield. Most of the Spree are still scattered—in safe houses, or underground with their cells. It’s not really their style, gathering en masse like this; the change in structure is an adjustment, and not every cell is willing to make it. But Willa Collar is convinced it’s the only way they can survive what’s coming, so most of them give her heel.

At least, this is what she’s told Raelle.

Willa doesn’t say anything as they walk. By the time she brings them to a stop at the edge of the airstrip, the silence has gone on for so long that Raelle wonders if she’s stalling. Then wonders _why_ she would be stalling. She’s worked herself halfway into a panic by the time Willa actually speaks.

“Frankly, darling, I don’t know why you’d ask me that.”

Against her will, Raelle’s eyes instantly prickle at the endearment; she smothers the feeling down, bristling with annoyance at how quickly and instinctively her body responded. But there was a time when she would have given anything to hear her mother call her _my darling_ or _my girl_ again, but now, everything’s different. Now, she’s not sure she wants to hear it. Not from this stranger, who is both her mother and somebody else.

“Because—” Raelle pauses, searching for more words that won’t incriminate her. She settles, lamely, on, “Because she’s my—friend. And I’m worried about her.”

Willa’s gaze turns sharp. “She’s your friend, now?” The maternal disappointment in her voice makes Raelle’s jaw clench. She has _no right_ to be mom-ing right now. “Because to my knowledge, you were her mark.”

“Clearly you don’t know everything, then.” It’s the wrong thing to say—Raelle’s left the door wide open for a number of things she _does not_ want to talk about—but it feels good to say it anyway.

Some of the fight goes out of Willa. “Raelle,” she says. “I understand you feel a certain… _allegiance_ toward Scylla. But you have to understand that you don’t owe her anything. You were a job, for her. I know she has a gift for manipulating people—”

“On _your orders_ ,” Raelle reminds her.

Willa’s nostrils flare at that. “Let me be perfectly clear,” she says tightly. “Ramshorn was under no orders to bring you in using any _unconventional_ methods.”

They’re brushing right up against all the things Raelle doesn’t ever want to talk to her about. She feels her face go furiously hot, and the words that spill out of her mouth next are angrier than she intended.

“I don’t care about what she’s done,” she snaps. “I just want you to tell me where she is _now_.” She pauses, and it’s a mistake; a lump forms in her throat, and Raelle knows her mother can hear her swallow it down before she adds, “I just want to know that she’s safe.”

They regard one another, mother to daughter, for a long moment, their breath loud in the still morning air. Raelle’s running hot with emotion, love and fury and the _years_ of missing her mother all clashing in her heart. But Willa’s just the opposite—cool and smooth and impenetrable—and Raelle can’t even begin to imagine where the two of them might find common ground.

From out of the hangar bay doors, a new group of trainees comes running in neat rows of two. They make their way to the others in the training paddock, and Raelle can see her mother’s gaze wandering back to where they’ve come from. She’s stuck on the sheer numbers of them. So many new trainees. Her mother will be pleased, eager to show the Army that, as potential allies, they’re a force to be reckoned with. But she wonders about them, all the things she once wondered about Scylla. How many of them are orphans? How many of them have lost so much that a balloon filled with death feels like some kind of gain?

How many of them, like Scylla, are scared?

“I’m sorry,” Willa says at last. She doesn’t sound particularly contrite—like Petra Bellweather, when Raelle confronted her about her mother’s death. She wonders if that would get under Willa’s skin, being compared in such a way to a woman she loathes. “But I can’t help you. The last I heard, Scylla had transferred to a different cell. They’re outside my jurisdiction. I don’t have any more information than that.”

“ _Transferred?”_ Raelle repeats, incredulous. “But—why? If this is about her and me—”

“It’s not,” Willa says curtly, and a tiny part of Raelle thinks, with relief, that possibly her mother doesn’t want to discuss all that, either. “And it’s not anything for you to worry about. Now, my girl.” She pivots back toward the training paddock, leaving Raelle no choice but to follow at her heels. “We’d better get you to your training.”

~*~

 _Training_ really isn’t the right word for it. The proper term, Raelle thinks, as yet another trainee swings their scourge at her, might be _punching bag_. If not for one very obvious difference.

The tip of the trainee’s scourge comes within a millimeter of Raelle’s face, but at this point, she barely flinches before it rebounds on the trainee. The girl howls as she’s slapped with her own weapon, hard enough to slam her back into the training mat. Raelle’s mother and her Necro specialist—Sergeant Fairchild, another soldier presumed KIA like Willa—look on without sympathy.

“Again?” Fairchild asks, making note of something on her clipboard.

Raelle’s mother shakes her head. Her expression is level, but Raelle can see the way she’s clenching her jaw, the same way Raelle does when she’s frustrated. “The scourges clearly aren’t enough of a threat,” she says.

Fairchild has the decency to look nervous. She flicks a glance at Raelle and says, “You don’t want to put her in _more_ peril?”

In spite of herself, Raelle likes Fairchild. She reminds her of Scylla’s old instructor, Sergeant L’Amara—the Necro thing, obviously, but she’s also aloof and a little intimidating, but kind when Raelle needed her to be. She was the only person in Willa’s Spree network with enough Necro training to examine Raelle after she got back from China, and to make any kind of authoritative guess about what happened to her and Abigail there.

“The mother mycelium is sentient,” she’d explained, prodding gently at the scar over Raelle’s heart where the Camarilla scythe should have killed her. “To a certain extent, it can move, think, and defend itself. If you touched it, it should have rebounded on you—quite aggressively, in fact.”

“It didn’t,” Raelle had told her, watching her hands trace back to the scythe’s entry point. A matching scar on her back, which Raelle has never seen. “It made a shape like a hand. Like _my_ hand. And it touched me back.”

She’d offered Fairchild her finger to examine, though all traces of the rot that had festered there for weeks had disappeared. The worry lines between Fairchild’s eyebrows deepened.

“I can’t prove anything,” she’d said slowly. “But if what you say is true—I mean, it shouldn’t be possible, but it sounds like the mother mycelium has put down roots in you.”

“What does that mean?” It had sounded disgusting. Raelle still didn’t—still _doesn’t_ —know what the mother mycelium was even used for, let alone what the implications of _putting down roots_ in her might be.

But Fairchild hadn’t answered. Just gave Raelle a sad, anxious look that spoke more clearly than words could have: _nothing good._

Willa’s determined that she find out, though. And so Raelle submits daily to the tender mercies of young Spree agents being trained up for combat, testing the limits of what the mycelium can do. She sits in the middle of the hangar bay while they come at her with knives, with scourges, sometimes just with their fists. She’s been windstruck more times than she can count, but none of it works. The blows glance right off of her, or sometimes, if she’s having a really bad day, rebound on her attacker. It’s totally unconscious, outside of her control, but even so, Raelle thinks it would have been pretty damn useful if this thing popped up _before_ she got stabbed in the heart.

Fairchild’s got a theory about that. It probably, according to her, took the threat of death to wake up the mycelium’s power in her in the first place.

Sometimes Raelle’s hard-pressed to say whether or not she’s grateful.

“Of course I’m not suggesting we _endanger my child_ ,” Willa snaps now, jogging Raelle back to the present. “But surely we can figure out a way to _simulate_ greater peril so the mycelium feels threatened enough to react.” She regards Raelle briefly, with cool detachment. It reminds Raelle of the look Anacostia gives her students in Basic when they fumble the same seed sounds over and over.

Willa’s not impressed with Raelle’s new abilities. Maybe Willa-the-mother is, but Willa-the-general is coming to the end of her patience. The Camarilla are on the move. The Army’s been silent since the Spree sent them Abigail as a peace offering. Willa keeps saying they need a show of force, but it’s more than just numbers: they need to give the Army something no one else can.

In other words: they need another witchbomb.

“There’s still one thing we haven’t tried,” Raelle opines, raising her voice to be heard over Willa and Sergeant Fairchild’s quiet bickering.

That gets both of their attentions quick. Willa purses her lips. “Raelle,” she says warningly.

This isn’t the first time they’ve had this conversation.

“I’m just saying! The only other time I managed it, I was linked with Abigail. Don’t you think that probably means she had something to do with it?”

“No,” Willa says, in a tone so cold that Fairchild visibly flinches beside her. “Actually, I don’t. Abigail’s not the one linked to the mother mycelium. Abigail has nothing to do with this.”

“If you’d just let me _see_ her, and Tally—”

Raelle knows she’s playing a dangerous game, pissing off Willa, but she can’t help herself. She’s exhausted, physically and emotionally. Fear for Scylla is derailing her every other thought, and the ones that remain on track are almost always of her sisters. Her sisters, whom Willa has forbidden her to see. Her sisters, who, until an alliance is formed, she’s supposed to think of as the enemy.

Without them—without Scylla—she feels pretty damn near to having nothing to lose.

She keeps her eyes on the ground for a moment until the threat of tears has passed. When she looks up again, her mother is staring at her with an expression that tells Raelle, in this moment, that she’s as much a stranger to Willa as Willa is to Raelle.

“I think you know why that’s impossible,” she says. She turns away, back toward her desk at the other end of the room. Without a backward glance, she adds, “We’re done for today. Fairchild will take you back home.”

As she watches her mother’s retreating back, Raelle reflects on the strangeness of that word, _home_. It’s possible, she thinks, that she doesn’t really have one anymore.

~*~

Back at the safe house, Raelle ducks into her bedroom without so much as a word to anyone. It’s early still, only a couple of hours past sunset, but she throws herself directly on the bed, fully clothed, and tries to settle in. The quicker she falls asleep, and the longer she stays that way, the better the chances are of Scylla getting through to her.

 _If she’s even still trying_ , a traitorous part of her brain chimes in unhelpfully. _If she ever was to begin with._

Raelle squeezes her eyes shut tighter and pretends she doesn’t hear.

When sleep finally pulls her under, she’s aware of it at once: instead of surrendering to senselessness, it feels like being woken up gently. Raelle has dream-linked enough times now to recognize the sensation, and her heart is in her throat, thumping hotly with anticipation, before she notices that there’s something… _off_.

The dreamscape around her is a restaurant—what Raelle _guesses_ is a restaurant. She’s sitting at a table tucked against a wall, and _that_ looks like a restaurant, but everything around her is dark. There’s really no other way to describe it. She’s surrounded on all sides by endless, abyssal black, and her little table with its two chairs is just in the middle of it all, existing.

Every time she’s dream-linked with Scylla, the dreamscapes have been vivid. Bright and colorful and _familiar_ : places that were special to Raelle, places that reminded her of Scylla. For a second, she can’t breathe, mind scrambling for purchase. She can’t think of a scenario where this doesn’t somehow prove all her worst fears about what might have happened to Scylla.

Then she looks up, and she sees that she’s no longer alone. But the figure standing at the other end of her table isn’t Scylla.

It’s Abigail.

Raelle has always been a little contemptuous of people who just… _hug_ all the time. (Tally, obviously, being the exception.) So she chalks it up to a really long, terrible week—a long, terrible week and temporary insanity—when she propels out of her chair and throws her arms around Abigail.

Abigail, who, for the record, is _also_ not a hugger. Who pats Raelle awkwardly on the back a couple of times, then says, “Take it easy, shitbird,” and gently disengages.

“What are you doing here?” Raelle can’t get over what a relief it is to see Abigail again.

Abigail cocks an eyebrow at her. “You were expecting someone else?” she teases.

Raelle hesitates. Just for a second, but that’s plenty of time for Abigail, who knows her surprisingly well at this point, to read the truth right off her expression. She rolls her eyes, but it’s good-natured. “You were expecting someone else,” she repeats. “A shitbird _and_ a lost cause.”

“That’s not important.” It is, but Abigail doesn’t need to know that. Not yet. “But seriously, why are you here? What’s going on? And what the hell is all _this?”_

She gestures at the abyss around them. Abigail sighs, shakes her head, and takes the seat opposite Raelle. “That,” she explains, “is the best I could do without having a physical link to you. And it took me days to do that much, so _I don’t want to hear it_.”

Raelle throws her palms up in surrender. Abigail cracks the tiniest smile.

“There’s a lot to tell you,” she says, leaning forward on her elbows and studying the sticky, bare surface of the table between them. “But first—you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” Raelle really could not care less about herself right now. “Are _you_ okay? How’s Tally?”

“Tally’s….as well as can be expected,” Abigail says carefully. Still a Biddy, then. Raelle knows it’s naïve, but part of her had hoped that Tally might be exempted when they got back to Fort Salem. Knowing that this is probably permanent makes her feel like she can’t breathe again. “She’s worried about you, though. We both are.”

Raelle ducks her head from Abigail’s gaze. She notices she’s been subconsciously mimicking Abigail’s posture, leaning forward on the table with her chin tucked beneath her hands. It’s embarrassing, but it also makes her feel weirdly secure. Abigail may be pompous and arrogant and all those other things Raelle once called her, but she’s also a leader, and it’s a comfort, for the first time in days, to have someone take charge whom Raelle actually trusts.

“The important thing, though,” Abigail says, “is that we have a plan to extract you.”

“ _Extract_ me?”

“From the Spree.” Abigail says it like it should be obvious. And while it’s true that Raelle’s not exactly allowed to leave (or see her sisters, or go anywhere without one of her mother’s lieutenants to escort her), it’s weird to think of her mother as someone she needs to be rescued from.

But maybe it’s not that far from the truth.

Still, Raelle feels compelled to say, “Abigail, I’m not really—like, my mom—she’s not _hurting_ me or anything. I’m not in any—”

“You don’t understand.” Abigail’s getting fired up about it; there’s a telltale gleam in her eye, the same she used to get when talking about battles and glory and sacrifice and crap. “The Spree aren’t happy that the Army wasn’t open for negotiations after they returned me. They sent Alder another offer this morning.” She swallows hard. She suddenly can’t look Raelle in the eye. “Evidently, they have another prisoner they’re willing to turn over to the Army.”

There’s a beat of silence.

“Me,” Raelle says woodenly. “But Abigail, that doesn’t—”

What she wants to say is _that doesn’t make sense_. After all the effort her mother’s put in to trying to make Raelle a weapon, why would she immediately bargain her away? She tries to say all that, but she falters, and as she’s mentally scrambling, Abigail cuts her off.

“That’s not all.” She reaches over to put a hand on Raelle’s shoulder, which, far from being comforting, drives home that whatever’s she’s about to say is really, really bad. “They told Alder that if the Army’s not willing to respond, this prisoner is no longer of use to them.”

For a minute, Raelle can’t speak. Can’t look at Abigail. Can’t bear the weight of her hand on her shoulder. When she finds her words, they come out clumsy: “That’s…that’s not…” She shakes her head. Starts again. “So, what you’re saying is my mom’s gonna, what? Kill me, if the Army won’t take me?”

“The Army _already_ won’t take you.” Abigail’s hands are balled into fists . “Anacostia says Alder won’t even consider the idea. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, she says.”

Raelle can feel a hysterical sob building in her throat. “Well, my mom’s gotta be bluffing, or something—I don’t know—Abigail, my mom’s not great, I _get_ that, but she wouldn’t _kill_ me.”

“You wanna take that chance?” Abigail’s voice is loud. It doesn’t quite disguise the panic in it.

“There’s no _chance_ —”

“Because I sure as hell don’t. And neither does Tally.” Abigail leans back in her seat. Some of the fight’s gone out of her, though she’s still breathing heavily. When she speaks again, there’s a quaver in her voice, so slight and so unexpected that Raelle’s half convinced she’s imagining it. “We are _not_ losing you again, shitbird. Think you can deal with that?”

Raelle just looks at her for a moment, beyond words. This is her sister, she thinks, turning the word over and over in her head. Her fiercely protective, incredibly infuriating sister, who refuses, time and again, to let her come to harm. It puts her in mind of her mother, this afternoon, saying, _we can figure out a way to simulate greater peril…_

All of this has been enough to make her head spin, but the most confusing thing is this: if it comes down to a choice of who to trust, Abigail or her mother, Raelle doesn’t even need to think about it. She already knows.

So when she finally finds her voice, what she says is, “Tell me what the plan is.”

~*~

The next morning, when Raelle arrives at the airfield, she finds her mother in the training ring, working through a series of drills with her scourge.

Willa Collar in battle mode is ferocious to behold. Watching her, Raelle thinks that even Abigail would be grudgingly impressed with the way she moves. The scourge is like an extension of her own arm, effortless and fluid; as Raelle watches, it licks through the air with a deafening _crack_ and comes down, hard, on the head of a training dummy, which promptly shatters. When Willa pauses to admire the pieces, Raelle can see she’s barely broken a sweat.

Willa Collar in battle mode is ferocious, but here’s the thing: Raelle’s been told she’s not half bad with a scourge, either.

Her mother doesn’t notice when she climbs into the ring with her. She’s muttering over the broken pieces of the training dummy, coaxing them to reform; by the time she looks up, Raelle is already standing at the opposite end of the ring, idly dangling her own scourge from her fingers.

“Thought you might like a sparring partner,” she says, casual.

Her mother’s eyes narrow. Raelle’s not surprised that she’s suspicious. Willa Collar is many things, but she’s nobody’s fool.

“Didn’t think you had much interest in the scourge,” she says breezily, brushing nonexistent dust off the front of her shirt.

“Not when a bunch of your agents are throwing theirs at me.” Raelle lifts an eyebrow at her and gestures between the two of them. “One on one, though? That, I could get behind.”

Willa hesitates. It’s just for a split second, but her facade slips, and Raelle knows she’s thinking of the mycelium’s built-in defenses. Knows that, on some level, her mother is afraid.

It’s all she needs to push forward.

“Who knows?” she taunts. “You’re pretty good with that thing. Better than your agents. Maybe the mycelium will finally feel _threatened_ enough for a witchbomb.”

Without taking her eyes off Raelle, Willa slowly, deliberately uncurls her scourge from where she’s looped it around her arm.

“So we’re lashing out, now, are we?” She makes a show of shrugging, as if the whole thing disinterests her terribly. “If this is what you need, my girl, then by all means let’s.”

And she whips her scourge away from her body, underhand, aiming straight for Raelle’s left arm. Like every recent blow before it, this one ricochets right off her, but Raelle’s mother hasn’t forgotten; she neatly ducks out of its way, just as Raelle had expected her to, and pivots so she’s facing Raelle once again.

Raelle’s not disappointed, though. Hurting her mother isn’t the point of this particular exercise. That point comes a moment later, when Raelle flings out her scourge so hard and fast that Willa’s momentarily thrown off her guard, backed into a corner of the training ring. She’s only disoriented for a second—Willa has been doing this a lot longer than Raelle has, after all—but Raelle is fast, and it’s enough time for her to cross the ring and get right up in her mother’s space, close enough that any blow to shake her off would immediately rebound on Willa.

“No.” Raelle’s breathing hard, but it feels good. She hadn’t realized till just now how much the anger in her had been simmering unchecked. How badly it needed to be let out. “No, I actually think what I _need_ is to know why you’re planning to kill me.”

Her mother’s mask slips again, this time showing true confusion. For a moment, Raelle has the horrible thought that she’s gotten it all wrong, _Abigail_ got it all wrong; but then Willa uses that against her, taking advantage of her distraction to knock her flat on the mat and leverage herself out of the corner.

So, Raelle thinks as all the air is slammed out of her body. The mycelium can be distracted, or something. That’s good to know.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Willa says. She’s standing directly over Raelle, twirling the tip of her scourge almost playfully. Looking once again like a smug general, commander of a conquering army.

Never mind that her army hasn’t actually conquered anything yet.

Raelle stays on the ground for a minute—in part because the wind’s been knocked out of her, and in part because she’s a little afraid of what her mother might do when she stands. In five minutes, she’s found a chink in the mycelium’s armor that five days of studying Raelle couldn’t. Who knows what she might find, given five minutes more?

“I know about your message to Alder,” she grits out. “The prisoner you want to give her in exchange for an alliance. The prisoner you’re threatening to _execute_ if the Army won’t cooperate.”

Willa flicks her scourge at Raelle. It’s more of a rebuke than an actual offensive move. “Is that what you know?” she asks, her tone now dripping, unexpectedly, with disgust. “And how, I wonder, would you have come by _that_ information?”

Her gaze burns into Raelle, but Raelle won’t let go of it, even as she finally, unsteadily climbs to her feet. This time, she’s determined, her mother will be the one to look away first.

“I have my ways,” she says.

Willa shakes her head. “You’re not a fool, Raelle. I’m surprised to see you behaving like one.”

Raelle privately thinks Abigail might say the same thing, if she knew what Raelle was doing right now. And it hadn’t initially been her plan to confront her mother at all. But when she saw her, alone in the training ring, there’d been something… _vulnerable_ isn’t the right word, not quite. But the absence, for once, of her ever-present lieutenants—the purity of her focus on the weapon in her hand—it had felt, in a way, like a lowering of her guard. Like an opening, in which Raelle could get some answers.

And, okay, maybe having them spar it out wasn’t her greatest idea. Especially since Willa’s skill with a scourge clearly outstrips Raelle’s. But Raelle’s been betrayed—so many times, and in so many ways, of which this is just the most recent. She’d told Scylla in their last dream-link that her mother deserved the chance to explain herself, and that’s still true, even if she _is_ planning something awful.

But Raelle also deserves to blow off a little steam.

“Ignoring, for a moment, that you’ve clearly been in communication with our enemies—” Willa lifts a hand up to quell Raelle’s protests before they come—“you can’t have seriously believed that the message was about you.”

“Who else could it have been about?” Raelle’s not above snapping her scourge warningly in her mother’s direction, the same way Willa just did. “Who else do you have that the Army would want?”

Willa gives her a pitying look and lashes out again with her scourge. Raelle sidesteps it quickly, if only because she doesn’t want Willa distracted by the ricochet. It’s a miscalculation: she stumbles, and ends up flat on her back again, with every bone in her body shouting in protest.

“The Army was _supposed_ to believe the message was about you,” Willa says. She stands over Raelle again, this time at such an angle that her silhouette blocks the light coming in from the window on the roof. “They don’t know the full extent of your powers like we do. They don’t know how valuable you are to us. And they don’t know that the Spree have any personal incentive to keep you alive.” She glares at Raelle pointedly. “Unless, of course, you’ve told them.”

Raelle has no answer for that. She watches, speechless, as her mother—apparently satisfied by her silence—turns to make her way out of the ring, leaving Raelle to struggle to her feet on her own.

And then, to Raelle’s astonishment, she turns back around. She watches as Raelle coughs and sputters and gropes blindly on the floor for her scourge, but when Raelle meets her eyes, the look in them could almost be described as soft.

“I know how angry you are with me,” she says, and Raelle’s heart lurches in her chest. It’s the most familiar her mother’s voice has sounded since she came back from the dead, and part of Raelle screams to throw herself into her mother’s arms. Let her make everything all right again, the way Raelle believed she could when she was younger. “And you have every right in the world to be, my girl. But I hope you understand that all of this is for _you_. To get you out of their war machine and give you a chance to _live_.”

Raelle is close, _so_ close, to just calling it quits right then and there. Her anger goes sighing out of her, and what’s left is that she just wants her mom. She’s tired and scared and she just wants her mom—the mom whom she finally recognizes, just a little, in the woman standing in front of her. In that moment, she’s prepared to call off the escape plan. To stay and give Willa another chance.

But before she can do that, she needs to understand one more thing.

“Then what are you planning on doing?” she asks. “When the Army expects a prisoner transfer, who will you give them?”

Willa waves the comment off. “We have someone,” she says shortly. “I think they’ll be interested enough.”

“Someone the Army wants?” Raelle’s skeptical. But also, something’s begun screaming, faintly, in the back of her mind—something she can’t quite make sense of, something she almost—

 _Oh_.

It hits her with such force, she thinks for a single, dazed second that her mother has knocked her down a third time. When she realizes she’s still upright, she looks at Willa, who’s looking back at her with unmistakable horror.

“Raelle,” she begins, pacifying.

And just like that, Raelle _knows_ , without a doubt:

The Spree have Scylla.

The Spree have Scylla, and they’re going to kill her. One way or another—by their own hand, or by giving her back to the Army—they’re going to kill her.

Suddenly, there’s adrenaline blazing through her limbs. It’s almost as if the mycelium has given her inhuman strength as well as invincibility: her scourge is flying out from her wrist before she has a chance to really think about what she’s doing, and a second later, Willa cries out when it lashes her shoulder.

“You told me you didn’t know where she was!” Raelle screams, and lashes out again, lightning-quick. This time, Willa’s ready, and there’s steel in her eyes, even as she clutches her shoulder in pain. She dodges, and lashes out in return with her own scourge.

This time, Raelle lets the ricochet roll back on her mother without remorse.

This time, her mother’s the one knocked flat.

Willa heaves herself to her feet readily enough, but her breath is coming hard through her teeth. “ _Enough_ ,” she snarls.

“Tell me I’m wrong, then!” Raelle knows she sounds hysterical, that she might actually be crying, but she doesn’t care. “Tell me it’s not Scylla!”

“The girl sold us out to the Army.” Willa’s seething, struggling to catch her breath after being knocked flat, and the struggle seems to just be making her angrier. “She was in contact with one of Alder’s right-hand women. She sold us out, just like she sold you out. Just like she’ll sell you out again, if you give her the chance.” She shakes her head in disgust. “Your loyalty’s for all the wrong people, my girl.”

“Yeah? And who are the _right_ people? You?” Raelle loops her scourge around her wrist, begins swinging it in tight, concentric circles over her head. It’s a good distraction from the way her voice is wobbling, or the tears she can’t seem to stop from running, hot and furious, down her face. “You hurt me worse than she ever did.”

Scylla’s done wrong—such a lot of it—but Raelle knows now that there were some things she never lied about. That she’d never hurt Raelle. That she loves her.

That, when it came down to it, she’d chosen Raelle instead of the Spree.

Looking at her mother’s disheveled, furious face, Raelle can’t honestly say she’d do the same.

She flicks her scourge with all her might at her mother’s ankle, and this time, Willa’s not quick enough to deflect it. She goes down hard—so hard that Raelle winces, in spite of everything.

“I am your _mother_ ,” Willa wheezes from the ground. It’s the last card in her hand, Raelle knows, and the one that ought to mean the most. The one that Willa herself has rendered the most insignificant. Raelle can almost pity her for that.

So it’s without any venom in her tone that she replies, “Yeah, Mom. But you know what? I still choose her.”

It’s a choice she made a long time ago, with a promise that _whoever you are, whoever you were, I’m with you_. Raelle hasn’t been perfect at keeping it. She figures both she and Scylla have stumbled a lot, on the way. But it’s a choice she keeps making, over and over again, in spite of everything that’s happened between them. She chooses Scylla, because Scylla is _hers_. Raelle’s not going to break that promise now.

So she walks out of the hangar without a backward glance, her scourge in hand, her mother on the ground behind her. Dimly, she can hear Willa shouting for her lieutenants—barking orders, telling them _do not let her leave_. She even hears as they begin to close in on her, shouting her name with their weapons in their fists.

But Raelle doesn’t slow down. Doesn’t stop moving. She knows, with absolute certainty, that none of them can stop her.

~*~

The plan—as Abigail had explained to her in the dream-link the previous night—was this: after lights-out, Abigail would sneak off base and make her way, on foot, to Salem Town. Anacostia had already arranged for the evening patrols to be staggered; there would be a brief window for her to escape unnoticed, as well as a car waiting for her in Salem Town. “She can’t help us as much as she’d like to,” Abigail had said. “Alder’s already suspicious. I don’t think she bought that your girlfriend escaped on her own.”

From Salem Town, Abigail was to drive to the state park in Wakefield. She and Anacostia had chosen the location for its secludedness, but also its proximity to both Malden and the Spree airfield. The idea was that no matter where Raelle was when she managed to escape, she’d be close enough to find Abigail before the Spree could find her. “That’s if you can manage to get there at all,” Abigail had added. “No offense, but you’re pretty shit at the seed spell for navigation.”

The plan was, by Abigail’s own admission, far from airtight. Anacostia was putting a lot on the line, and had a long, long way to fall if things went south. Abigail would almost certainly be punished for going AWOL, even if she returned to Fort Salem with Raelle. And, as much as Raelle hates to admit Abigail was right about something, she _is_ pretty shit at the seed sound for navigation.

That doesn’t stop her from fumbling her way to the rendezvous point a full sixteen hours earlier than the agreed-upon time.

Now—tucked out of sight of one of the hiking trails that borders the lake, in the shelter of the trees—Raelle waits for night to fall, and reminds herself, again and again, of this fact: _it was never a foolproof plan_.

If the plan was shoddy to begin with, she reasons, it won’t matter too much that she wants to fuck it up even more.

Still, something in her cringes, just a little, when she sees the headlights from Abigail’s car come cutting through the dark.

She can tell Abigail’s surprised to see her there already—they’d aimed for Raelle to make her escape closer to morning, and it’s barely past midnight. But she doesn’t remark on it. Just embraces Raelle without a word (this is a _thing_ now, Raelle guesses; Tally will be delighted), then steps back to give her the once-over. “You okay?” she asks.

Raelle nods easily, even though she’s hungry and exhausted and emotionally used up. Even though her mind’s been running nonstop terrible scenarios for hours—images of her mother killing Scylla, of the Spree hurting her in retaliation. She’s not about to tell Abigail any of that. Not yet. “Yeah,” she lies, “you?”

“Yeah,” Abigail says with the same careless ease. Raelle wonders if she’s lying, too. “Anyone follow you here?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Sure about that?”

“I’ve been here since noon. I think they’d have found me by now.”

“You’ve been here since—?” Abigail shakes her head. “Never mind. Let’s go.”

She gestures to the car. Raelle reads the signal loud and clear: time to stop putting off the inevitable. She plants her feet more firmly in the earth and says, “Actually, Abigail—I need a favor first.”

Abigail looks at her incredulously, but Raelle can read the expression: she’s really _not_ that surprised that Raelle’s bringing a complication to an op that’s already flying by the seat of its pants. “ _This_ is your favor,” she says. “I’m saving your ass and hoping I don’t get court-martialed for it. _Let’s go._ ”

“The Spree have Scylla,” Raelle blurts. Which is definitely not the way she intended to explain herself, but it’s the thought that’s been drumming in time with her heartbeat all day. The Spree have Scylla, and they might hurt her. The Spree have Scylla, and that means she’s not safe.

Now Abigail’s looking at her as though she’s recently sprouted a second head. “Yes,” she says slowly. “Scylla’s Spree. This is old news.” She squints. “Are you _sure_ you’re okay? You don’t _look_ okay.”

“No, I mean—the Spree found out Scylla was working with Anacostia. They have her somewhere.” She can hear her voice shaking. Can see, just barely by the glare of the car’s headlights, the way Abigail’s eyes instantly soften, though the rest of her expression remains hard. “Abi, they’re gonna kill her.”

And Abigail, bless her, doesn’t say anything—not right away. Raelle knows there’s plenty she _could_ say to that—knows there’s no love lost between Abigail and Scylla—but she doesn’t. Instead, she considers Raelle carefully. Raelle has an idea of what she’s thinking: that Raelle doesn’t have very many options that don’t involve getting in the car with Abigail, but also, that she’ll walk to wherever Scylla is if she has to.

Abigail huffs out a long breath. It’s part fond exasperation, part genuine annoyance. “You just can’t let this one go?”

“Never,” Raelle breathes.

“So if I don’t help you, chances are good you’ll get yourself killed looking for her.”

“Probably.”

“And you don’t know where she’s being held?”

“Not yet.”

“Fuck it.” Abigail still sounds annoyed, but Raelle could swear that the familiar bloodlust gleam is back in her eyes. “I can be AWOL a little longer. What’re they gonna do to a _Bellweather?”_

Raelle laughs at that. It comes out sounding more like a sob, and she’s mortified to see that she’s started crying again without realizing it. (So, this is _also_ a thing now. Still not quite as embarrassing as the hugging.)

“Thank you,” she says. The words seem pathetically small for everything she feels right now, but she thinks maybe it doesn’t matter. Abigail understands.

“Yeah, whatever.” Abigail waves her off, embarrassed. “You owe me one and all that. Focus up. How are we gonna get your girl back?”

Raelle allows herself the smallest of grins.

“First,” she says, “there’s something I need you to teach me.”

~*~

Half an hour later, they’re making their way out of the state park, rolling at a glacial speed toward Wakefield’s main thoroughfare. Abigail drives, keeping a sharp eye out for balloons and suspicious vehicles. Raelle lies in the back seat, tracing a rune against her temple until she dreams.

It feels strange to be initiating the dream-link this time, even after the nights of Scylla’s absence when she’d longed repeatedly to be able to do just that. It doesn’t feel much different than any of the times before, though: like slipping into awareness instead of out of it. A slow waking up.

The dreamscape, when she becomes aware of it, is barely perceptible, flushed with so much bright light. It makes keeping her eyes open painful. At first Raelle thinks this is evidence of clumsy Work—it _is_ her first time trying this, after all. Maybe the bright light is like the opposite of the darkness that surrounded Abigail’s restaurant dreamscape: a void of a different color.

Then the realization slithers, cold, into her brain. This isn’t a void of any kind. This is somewhere she’s been before.

Once she knows this, everything about the dreamscape seems to snap into place, solidify in her mind. The stone walls just barely visible behind the glaring lights. The cold. Raelle can’t remember ever perceiving temperature in a dream-link before, but now, it feels so real to her that she shivers, and pulls her jacket more tightly around her.

In the center of the room, there’s an empty chair.

For weeks, Raelle had seen this room every time she closed her eyes. It dogged her dreams through Citydrop and beyond. She’d wake up in her dorm in Circe, with Tally snoring lightly above her, and still feel the barrenness of it, the loneliness. It was the secret she’d nursed beneath all her rage and bluster, after Scylla was revealed as a traitor: that the thought of her trapped in that horrible place for weeks on end was unbearable, even once she knew the reason why.

But the chair is empty, and Scylla is—

“Raelle?”

Raelle turns around and she’s there. She’s there, with her hands unbound and her throat bare—her eyes watery and her lower lip trembling, but free. And while part of Raelle wonders if Scylla can see the same dreamscape as her—wonders, sick at heart, if in her mind, Scylla’s still trapped in that cell—the larger part of her is fixated on this one fact: _Scylla is free_. Not bound to the chair the way she was in the real cell: this time, there’s nothing to prevent Raelle from grabbing her and folding her into her arms.

And it still feels like nothing, like putting her hands around an empty space, but Raelle swears she can still feel Scylla trembling. She’s crying against Raelle’s shoulder, horrible, heaving sobs, and even though there’s nothing really _to_ hold, Raelle instinctively tightens her arms around her.

“Oh my God,” Scylla says. “Oh my _God_. How did you—oh my _God_.”

Raelle shushes her gently. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, it’s all right—look at me.” She moves so she’s holding Scylla at arm’s length, where she can properly study her face. Scylla doesn’t look like she’s been hurt (thank God, or the Goddess—thank anyone who’s listening), but she still looks terrible. Weak and small in a way Raelle can’t remember ever seeing her before, even at her worst. Her Scylla is boisterous and smug, all confidence and flirtation. This girl looks like her, but a hollowed-out version, with everything vibrant and essential drained from her eyes.

“Are you okay?” Raelle can’t resist the urge to touch her face, even though she knows Scylla can’t feel it. “Have they been hurting you?”

Scylla shakes her head, pressing into Raelle’s palm like she thinks if she pushes hard enough, she’ll be able to feel it. “I’m all right,” she says. “Raelle, I’m so sorry, I’m—”

“ _Shh, shh_ , none of that.” Raelle catches her gaze and forces her to hold it. “Listen to me, okay? Abigail and I are coming to get you. But to do that, we need to know where you are. Is there anything you can—”

Scylla cuts her off, shaking her head frantically. “No,” she moans. “No, Raelle. They’ll catch you, they’ll hurt you, and I couldn’t—”

“This isn’t up for debate.” It’s practically a rehash of her argument with Abigail in the dream-link the other night. Raelle finally sort of gets Abigail’s frustration with the whole thing: it’s hard, having somebody you love refuse to be saved.

Not that she’ll ever admit that to Abigail, of course.

Scylla looks at her with fresh tears welling in her eyes. “How are you even here right now?” she asks. “Did you say you were with _Abigail?”_

And, logically, Raelle knows she shouldn’t waste any more time. Not when they already have so little of it. Not when Scylla’s life hangs in the balance. But she shoves that logic down hard, because Scylla’s looking up at her with such wonder and trepidation, and she _needs_ Raelle right now, and the last time she needed Raelle like this, Raelle told her she didn’t care if she died.

Anything she can do to make Scylla believe the opposite is true _this_ time (was always true, every time) is worth a little risk.

So Raelle guides them both to the far wall of the cell. Because it’s a dream, there’s nothing preventing them from slipping behind the floodlights, into the merciful cool of the shadows behind them. Raelle guides them both to a seated position on the floor, keeping both of her hands wrapped around one of Scylla’s. The physics of dream-linking don’t allow either of them to feel the touch, but it works as a way to anchor Scylla close to her.

And Raelle tells her everything. _Almost_ everything: none of the big truths that she’s itching to tell, but the small ones that got them both here. The day she looked for Scylla and found the mother mycelium instead. How the mycelium put its roots down in her and saved her life. How her mother wanted to make her a weapon for the Spree, and how Raelle mistakenly thought she’d be the one gambled away.

Scylla listens quietly all the while, never taking her eyes off Raelle’s face.

“But then I found out it was you,” Raelle concludes. “So I ran.” Silence hangs between them for a moment, the weight of that admission sinking in. “And Abigail came to rescue me, but I think—I _think_ I have an idea for how we can make it out of this alive. All of us.”

She hasn’t even admitted this much to Abigail, but it’s something that’s been in the back of her mind since her confrontation with her mother. Since she thought, long and hard, about what being made into a weapon for the Spree might mean.

But Scylla distracts her by shaking her head again. “You need to leave me out of this,” she says.

“Not gonna happen,” Raelle replies, forceful. Scylla huffs impatiently.

“Raelle, I…I deserve everything that’s coming to me. I know it, and you do, too.” She turns away from Raelle at last, staring at the cold stone beneath them, though she keeps their fingers laced tightly together. “I’ve messed up too many times. There’s no place in this story for me anymore.”

And Raelle _gets_ it, just a little. For so long, Scylla’s only worth has been in what she has to offer. The Army wanted her body to feed its war machine. The Spree wanted her pain and her anger, so they could create more. And while Raelle still feels the hurt of her betrayal, and probably always will, she understands just a bit better that it’s been a long, long time since anyone has wanted Scylla just for herself.

Raelle might have been the first.

It’s too much for her to put into words, so she shuts down that part of her brain and switches to pure instinct. She grabs the back of Scylla’s head and brings their mouths together in what, if not for the limits of the dream-link, would be a hard, punishing kiss. But even if Scylla can’t feel it, Raelle wants the sentiment to come through; and so she holds her there for a long, drawn-out minute.

It’s a kiss that says _everything will be all right._ It’s a kiss that says _you’re mine_. And when they break apart, Scylla is looking at her with a tortured mix of confusion and joy and terror. She touches her fingertips to her heart, like she’s feeling something mysterious working under her skin. She, Raelle thinks, is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen in her life.

“That’s bullshit,” she says, her voice rough. “I _love_ you, Scyl. Your place is wherever I am. For as long as you want it to be. Understand?”

There are tears in Scylla’s eyes again when she nods, but this time, Raelle thinks, they’re of a different kind. She leans her forehead against Scylla’s, and for a moment, just listens to the sound of their breathing as it slowly falls into a matching rhythm.

Scylla pulls away first. “What do you need me to do?” she asks, and her voice sounds steadier. Just the littlest bit like her old self, the Scylla that Raelle remembers and loves best. It makes her smile, in spite of herself.

When she finds Scylla in the real world, she doesn’t know if she’ll forgive her, but she knows she’ll never let her go.

“Tell me everything you can about the place where they’re keeping you,” Raelle instructs. “And after that, just—hold on. Okay?”

~*~

They find the safe house on a road that overlooks the sea: a shabby, dilapidated eyesore, sagging in between a pair of elegant colonial mansions. The whole block, actually, is fairly oozing old-money New England; Raelle guesses the Spree must have glamoured the house to be invisible to non-witches.

The air is thick with the smell of low tide, salt and drying-out seaweed. Just like Scylla said. There doesn’t appear to be a soul about, so Raelle quietly sings seed eighty-seven again—the seed of Locating. Meant for ferreting out landmines, not people, but she feels an answering resonance almost at once. Scylla’s near.

She nods to Abigail, and they make their way forward in the dark.

Scylla had been able to give them a pretty good idea of where she was being held—she knows a lot more about the Spree network than Willa thinks, and was able to fill in the gaps with a few good guesses. But this doesn’t put Raelle at ease. Just the opposite; it all feels too easy, and she’s irritating the hell out of Abigail with her jumpiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Relax before you give us away,” she murmurs out of the side of her mouth. “There’s someone there, look.”

Raelle obeys and peers into the darkness. Sure enough, there’s someone on the porch of the Spree house: a man, by the looks of him, standing on the house’s sagging porch with a mug in his hand, staring out at the block. It’s an inocuous pose—just a man enjoying his morning coffee before heading out to work—if not for the fact that it’s four o’clock in the morning, and the rest of the street is still wrapped in sepulchral silence.

Raelle swallows and nods to Abigail. There’s no way of knowing how many more Spree agents are inside the house, or whether they’re expecting company. But they know there’s one posted to stand guard, and that’s enough to know what needs to happen next. They’re going to have to fight their way in.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” Raelle hisses. “Something I forgot to—”

But she never gets the chance to tell Abigail _oh, by the way, I’m indestructible now, maybe stay out of my way_. Because at that moment, the Spree agent on the porch whips his head in their direction. Abigail tries to duck, yanking Raelle down with her, but it’s already a lost cause. Clearly, they were expected.

The sentry’s jaw drops open, and the sound that comes out of his mouth is a high-pitched alarm.

Later, Raelle doesn’t remember much about the actual fight. It’s a blur of darkness and panic and confusion, from which occasionally, concrete memories emerge. She knows she heard Abigail screaming at her to _move, goddammit_ —remembers the Spree agent on the front porch sending a windstrike toward them, and the way it doubled back on him with such force, his body crashed into the wall of the house. She remembers the way more agents came spilling out the front door, like ants swarming out of an anthill: so many of them, more than Raelle would have thought could fit in such a small house. And then their bodies streaming around her, the long tongues of their scourges being tossed right back at them as they tried to lash out at Raelle; and then a very distinct, “What the _fuck_ , Collar?” that definitely came from Abigail, but might have been either admiration or annoyance. In hindsight, Raelle thinks it might have been both.

She remembers somehow pressing her way through the front door, and the metallic taste in her mouth as she allowed the panic to overtake her. As she barrelled blindly into doors, fighting off Spree who _never stopped fucking coming_ : senseless of the danger, senseless of Abigail, senseless of everything that wasn’t Scylla.

And then her memory goes elastic, snapping back into hard focus at the point where she’s finally knocked in the right door.

And Scylla’s there, with her hands tied in front of her, and a crude version of the Army’s silencer looped around her neck. She looks exhausted and bruised but when she sees Raelle, her eyes grow wide, and just like that, all the fear leaves Raelle’s body at once.

Because Scylla’s here, and she’s all right, and while that’s not quite a victory, it already feels like Raelle’s won.

“Raelle,” Scylla says frantically, because the Spree have caught up: they’re amassing behind her now, a half-dozen of them easily, bottlenecking the door of Scylla’s room. They’re singing, but it’s not a sound Raelle’s ever heard before—it’s building up to something terrible, something she’s not sure even the mycelium can protect them from.

Something grabs hold of her hand then, and Raelle looks down to see Scylla, still crouched on the floor, holding her hand clumsily between both of her bound ones. It’s the first touch she’s been able to feel, since they started dream-linking, and it’s a shock to the system. So much so that, for a second, Raelle thinks what happens next is just her body reacting to Scylla’s touch.

But then Scylla’s eyes catch on their joined hands, and Raelle sees the dark tendrils gathering around the place where their fingers touch.

The Spree see it too; their singing cuts off so quickly, it’s like someone’s cast the seed of Silencing.

But Raelle only has eyes for Scylla, who’s looking up at her again with equal parts confusion and terror.

Based on past experience—past experience and the way the black tendrils are growing fast around them—Raelle knows there’s no time. She grips Scylla’s hand tighter.

“It’s okay,” is all she has time to say before the witchbomb explodes.

~*~

When Abigail finds them, it’s in a flat circle of earth at the center of where the safe house once stood, with Spree bodies littered all around.

Abigail’s sporting a slight limp, but otherwise looks unharmed. Even though she’s seen this before—been _part_ of it, the previous time—she looks afraid. Which is such a strange expression, Raelle thinks dully, on the face of Abigail Bellweather.

“Rae,” she says hoarsely. “How?”

Raelle sits amid the destruction, beyond words. It’s different, this time, than it was in the Altai Mountains. Then, they were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by terrifying new enemies. Now, they’re barely five miles from home, and the bodies that surround them are more than just old foes. Some of them, Raelle knows, might have been people she knew, back at the airfield. Might have been friends of her mother’s.

She shakes her head at Abigail and holds Scylla tighter to her. The blast—smaller, she thinks, than the one in the Altai Mountains, but still terrifying in its size—had been forceful enough to knock Scylla against the wall. She sags, unconscious, like a rag doll against Raelle’s side, but her breathing is steady.

“I don’t know,” she admits. What she doesn’t admit, not right now, is that she has an idea.

They’re both suddenly aware of the houses on either side of them: one still dark, apparently unoccupied, but the other has flicked on every light, and the sound of frantic voices is mounting within.

“We need to go,” Raelle says.

Abigail nods. “Wait here,” she instructs. “I’ll get the car. Be ready.”

She moves fast, in spite of her limp. Against Raelle’s shoulder, Scylla makes a low noise of pain and begins to stir.

“Shh.” Raelle presses a kiss to her forehead, and it’s another, smaller shock to the system. In spite of everything that’s happened, her mind can’t let go of how strange it is that she’s really here. That she can really touch her.

There’s going to be questions, later—so many questions, so many things Raelle will have to answer for. But here, she thinks, is one good thing. One good thing among the rubble.

“I’ve got you,” she promises. “We’re going somewhere safe now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to Scylla's POV next week! Thank you, as always, for reading and commenting.


	4. Part Four: The Beach

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, folks. Final chapter. What a ride it's been.
> 
> Before you read, I'd like to address a couple of things:
> 
> 1.) When I originally drafted the outline for this story, I envisioned a potential fourth chapter as being more of an epilogue. (I was not, at the time, thinking of expanding this universe whatsoever.) That sentiment....still holds pretty much true for this chapter; if I had to describe it succinctly, I'd call it a "talk-heavy victory lap." Apologies if you prefer the action! 
> 
> 2.) This chapter is rated M for Sexy Stuff™️. I know the whole fic is rated M, but tonally, everything previous has been somewhere around a T. Since I know that Sexy Stuff™️ is not everyone's cup of tea, I've marked off that section with three asterisks (***) instead of my usual paragraph breaks (which are these: ~*~). You won't be missing any major plot points if you skip.
> 
> 3.) Some of you have asked about future projects. I'll address that in the notes below.
> 
> 4.) I apologize deeply for the use of the phrase "these unprecedented times" in this fic.
> 
> **UPDATE 08/24/2020:** Y'all I can't even handle this right now, [holeybubushka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/holeybubushka/pseuds/holeybubushka) commissioned [this fanart](https://holeybubushka.tumblr.com/post/627366872157913088/hello-so-a-little-while-ago-i-fell-in-love-with) of the porch scene from this chapter and I'm never ever ever ever ever gonna be over it.

The dream begins the same way it always does: on a beach in Massachusetts, just before sunset, when the fishing boats are beginning to make their way back to shore.

Scylla has dreamed of this place so many times. She knows the number of boats in the harbor, and the color the sun turns their sails when it starts to set. She’s climbed to the upper deck of the abandoned lighthouse and run her fingers over the faded graffiti there. The way the beach curves itself against the sea is a shape as familiar to her as the topography of her own body—as familiar as the freckles on her arms, or the witch-mark on her hip bone. She’s never really known what other people mean when they talk about _home_ , but sometimes, she likes to think of this place as hers.

There’s nowhere else in her life that’s been so consistent: no place that’s stayed with her, and no place where she’s ever managed to stay.

But even this isn’t really a _place_. It’s a dream—woven and unraveled and woven again, night after night, from the same memory-fabric. Which at times seems too thin for the world it’s created. There’s so much space and time separating Scylla from that week at the beach; sometimes, when she’s dreaming of standing in the dunes, watching the waves lick the shore, she catches herself wondering if the real Labor-in-Pain even looks like this. If she hasn’t already forgotten most of it, and filled in the gaps of her memory with things that don’t really exist.

She wonders, and then, inevitably, her gaze falls upon her parents. That’s when Scylla _knows_ , beyond a doubt, that the real Labor-in-Pain couldn’t possibly look like this. Not in the most important of ways.

They’re always here with her, in the dreams. Sometimes they’re just a feeling—a sense that someone’s waiting for her close by, or a room that feels recently vacated. Other times, the dream folds itself into a new shape, a terrible one, and their bodies are lying in the sand, the surf running red with their blood. And sometimes—the worst times—they’re just _gone_ , as if they were never here in the first place. Those, in particular, are the reason why Scylla knows the landscape of this dream so well: she’s had to tear every inch of it apart trying to find them again.

But tonight is one of the good nights. Tonight, her parents are wading in a sea that’s shot through with orange light from the sinking sun, fussing with a disposable camera. They’re snapping pictures—of the waves, the lighthouse, their footprints in the wet sand—and laughing at the results. Her mother’s laugh is unguarded in a way it never was when she lived, a clear, hard note of joy that makes Scylla’s heart ache. She wants to run down to the beach to join them, wants to fling herself into her mother’s arms, but at the same time, part of her wants to stay exactly where she is, and just watch them. Part of her thinks that maybe, if she doesn’t disrupt this moment, it will last forever.

But then her father turns around, craning his neck toward her, and that part of Scylla goes silent.

_Honey!_ he calls, projecting to be heard over the sound of the thrashing surf. Scylla can hear the laughter still caught in his throat. _Honey, come look at this!_

He beams up at her. His smile is huge and dopey and utterly infectious, just as Scylla remembers it; he makes it impossible not to smile back. Her mother is hanging on to his arm, her head eclipsed by a huge, ridiculous sun hat, and it’s easy, so easy, to forget that these versions of her parents belong not just to a dream, but to a different world entirely. A world without safe houses or military police, without the threat of the scourge hanging over them wherever they slept. And Scylla’s desire for these versions of her parents to just _live_ is so strong that she ignores, just for a moment, the fact that they never really lived at all.

But then she shoves the thought aside, because this time with them in her dreams is precious. She won’t waste a second of it.

When she starts to climb down from the dunes to join them, though, something in the dream shifts. It’s nearly imperceptible at first, but Scylla knows this dream better than almost anything in her life, and she sees. It’s a slight uptick in the wind. A sudden swell in the waves. A darkening of the sky out over the sea, where she could swear there wasn’t a single cloud before. Scylla knows well how this dream can twist at a moment’s notice, but this feels different. This doesn’t feel like the start of a nightmare; it feels like a warning.

When she reaches her parents at the lip of the shore, they’re still smiling, but the giddy joy she saw in them before has been replaced with something infinitely gentler. Her mother folds her into her arms at once, and while Scylla can still feel her touch—true dreams are unlike dream-links, in that way—it feels somehow _wrong_. Like a sunburn itch all over her body. Like what Scylla imagines snakes feel, in the moments before they shed their skin.

She wants to ask them if something’s wrong, but then her father’s hand comes down heavy and warm on her shoulder. _You ready, kiddo?_ he asks.

Scylla peers back at him over her mother’s shoulder. Behind him, the storm clouds have gathered into a dark fist on the horizon; thunder rumbles faintly, and the sudden gust of wind that blows off the sea smells of salt and petrichor.

The week they lived at Labor-in-Pain, it hadn’t rained. Not once.

Scylla can hear the way her voice trembles as she asks, “Ready for what?”

Her mother takes a step back, then, and holds her at arm’s length. Her hands cup Scylla’s face, thumbs brushing at tears Scylla didn’t know she was crying.

_To wake up_ , she says simply. _It’s just about time, don’t you think?_

And here it is, finally: the thing she’s feared all along. Worse than the nightmares, worse than reliving the memory of finding their bodies on the floor—the potential to be locked out of these dreams for good.

There’s a sound of rhythmic thumping coming from somewhere near. Scylla follows the sound to one of the rental cottages behind the dunes. Its front door has somehow slipped its moorings, and is swinging wildly in the wind, open and shut, open and shut. The sound is like a heart, trying to beat out of its chest.

“No.” Scylla shakes her head frantically, holding hard to her mother’s gaze. Her mother’s eyes are a darker shade of blue, not quite the same as Scylla’s—this is one of the things she knows she will never forget. “No,” she repeats, “I’m not—it’s not time. Not yet.”

She doesn’t know exactly what they’re talking about, but there’s a feeling of dread, now, coiled low in her belly. Her father chuckles, and while he’s still smiling, there’s another thing Scylla hasn’t forgotten: the way his voice sounded when he was holding back tears. She feels like her heart’s in a vice and it’s squeezing, squeezing, squeezing so hard she can’t breathe.

She feels wetness on her shoulders, and for a second, thinks her father is crying; but then there’s a rumble of thunder, and the sand around their feet blooms with a million wet drops as it starts to rain.

_It’s never going to feel like the right time_ , her father says. _But it is_ this _time. And this time, kiddo, is all we get._

Scylla shakes her head again, beyond words. She clings to both of them, like she’s five years old again, hiding in a closet while their neighbor pounded on their windows and doors. _Witches!_ he’d screamed, the word so sharp and ugly in his mouth; but her parents’ presence had been steady, an anchor, and eventually, he’d gone away.

She wants to ask them if they remember that day. Wants to tell them: _That is still what the world is like; it hasn’t changed since you’ve gone._

Wants to tell them: _There are so many ways for them to kill us, ways I never even imagined._

Wants to tell them: _I can’t face that alone._

She must say all these things out loud after all, because suddenly, both her mother and her father are looking at her, with identical smiles stretched wide over their faces. It’s almost unsettling, how much their expressions don’t match the things Scylla’s just said; but then her father leans in, holds her by the shoulders and kisses the top of her head.

_That’s the amazing thing_ , he says. _This time, you’re_ not _alone._

A sharp bolt of lighting cleaves the sky in two. The wind howls so hard, it sounds like a human voice, bellowing in grief. Scylla’s parents are right in front of her, but they already feel so far away; when her mother reaches out to touch her face, it seems as though she has to stretch her arms across a very long distance to do so.

_It’s time to wake up, Scylla_ , her mother says; and just like that, Scylla does.

~*~

When she wakes, it’s in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar bed with sheets that smell of dust and sunblock. There’s a window open somewhere nearby, and a breeze blowing in with such ferocity it makes the curtains billow like ghosts. It smells of rain, and the brine of the ocean, so strongly that for several groggy minutes, Scylla thinks she must still be dreaming.

When it becomes evident that she’s fully awake, she sits up gingerly and takes stock of her surroundings. The bedroom looks like it belongs to an elderly woman’s kitschy beach house: sand-colored walls, bowls of seashells on the dresser, a lamp that looks like a lighthouse. Even the quilt covering her has a repeating motif of starfish and sand dollars. When Scylla peels back the sheets, she sees that she’s still dressed in the filthy clothes she was wearing when Willa had her kidnapped; but someone has removed her shoes, and left them neatly lined up beside the door.

Her head is throbbing, but it’s dull; almost more like a memory of pain than pain itself.

And there are voices out in the hall, beyond the door, which has been left open just a crack. Voices conferring in hushed tones—for a second, she thinks of her parents, the memory of them in her dream still clinging. Then shakes the thought off and listens.

“I don’t see why you can’t just fix her and leave her be.” Abigail’s voice, exasperated as usual, and not making too great an effort to speak quietly. “You fixed my leg in, what, two minutes?”

“Yeah, you’re welcome, by the way.”

Scylla’s breath catches at the sound of Raelle’s voice. She can’t remember much of what happened after Raelle burst into her room at the Spree safe house (like a fucking knight in shining armor, fire in her eyes and scourge in her fist), but she remembers the witchbomb. Remembers being thrown against a wall, and then suddenly being outside, with someone holding her. Remembers lips on her skin, and a feeling of warmth that had lanced through all the pain and bleariness, anchored to that spot on her forehead.

It’s a relief to hear her voice again. A relief to know she’s near.

“I mean, have you thought about what I’m going to have to say if I go back without you? ‘Oh, sorry I went AWOL. What’s that? _Why_ did I go AWOL? No reason, I’m sure.’”

“I told you I owe you one.” Raelle sounds weary but fond. She’s bantering, Scylla realizes, and again she’s struck by how bizarre it is, hearing Abigail and Raelle interact as _friends_.

She’s missed so much in such a short time.

Abigail snorts. “Oh, you owe me _way_ more than just one,” she says. “Maybe I should start collecting on it now. Would you come back with me if I said I wanted to collect on it now?”

“I can’t leave her, Abi.”

The burning thing in Scylla’s chest—the thing she’s tried her damnedest not to feed—flares so bright, it leaves her momentarily paralyzed.

The conversation outside continues on, heedless of Scylla’s emotions. “She’ll be fine on her own,” Abigail argues.

“Not if the Spree or the Army come looking.”

“ _Why_ would they come looking for her _here?”_

“I’ll go tomorrow morning.” Scylla can picture so clearly the stubborn little pout on Raelle’s face. She doesn’t know exactly what they’re arguing about, but she thinks it’s a pretty safe bet that Abigail won’t win this round. “Maybe the day after, depending on Anacostia.”

“ _Riiiiight_. Your terrible plan.”

“It’s not a _terrible plan_.”

“No,” Abigail drawls, “a terrible plan would be going AWOL to rescue my sister’s terrorist girlfriend. Then letting her _bring_ said terrorist girlfriend back to Fort Salem so _they_ can kill her, instead of letting the terrorists finish the job.”

Scylla’s heart skips a beat at that, but before she has a chance to properly panic over whatever it might mean, she hears Raelle say, “ _Abi_ ,” a note of warning in her voice.

“Not funny?” It’s not really an apology, but to her credit, Abigail sounds genuinely contrite.

“No,” Raelle agrees, and Scylla looses a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. “Look, don’t do it for Scylla’s sake, I get that. Don’t even do it for me. Do it for _Tally_. If the plan works—”

“The terrible plan.”

“ _Fine_. If the _terrible plan_ works, which you _know_ it could—”

“Oh- _kay_ , fine. You’ve convinced me.” Scylla hears them start to walk away, their footsteps loud in the hall even as their voices grow fainter. “But if it all goes to shit—”

“You can say I told you so.”

“I’m gonna have a lot more to say about it than that.”

Their amicable bickering grows more and more indistinct till it fades away completely. Everything’s still and quiet then, save for the wind fussing at the curtains. Scylla considers getting up to close the window, then decides she’d rather not jostle her head too much when it still feels so tender. The rain and the wind and the wildness, so close but not quite touching her, makes her feel like she’s in the eye of a storm. If the eye of a storm was full of decorative pillows that say _Life’s a Beach!_

Someone knocks softly at the door. Scylla lifts her head just in time to see Raelle peer almost shyly into the room.

“You’re awake,” she says, gently easing around the door. “How’s your head feel?”

Scylla pulls herself into a sitting position; the movement hurts her head a little, but it’s a manageable sort of pain. “Not too bad,” she says. She desperately wants Raelle to come closer, hates the way she’s standing in the middle of the carpet, looking anxious and unmoored, when Scylla wants nothing more than for her to come sit with her—but she doesn’t invite her closer. Instead, she curls her hands into fists beneath the quilt and asks, “Where are we?”

“Summer rental on Marblehead.” Raelle hesitates. “Is it, uh—” She gestures helplessly with her hands. “It is okay if I look at you?” Her cheeks go furiously pink; and she quickly adds, “Your injuries, I mean.”

Scylla is helplessly, _ridiculously_ in love with her right now. So much so that she’s not sure she remembers how to speak. She hears herself draw a shaky breath, and knows that Raelle hears it, too; the color on her face deepens, and it officially doesn’t matter if Scylla remembers how to speak or not, because she knows she can’t trust herself with words. She nods instead, and awkwardly pushes the quilt away from her body.

Raelle carefully situates herself at the edge of the bed, making a point of keeping space between the two of them. There’s an almost tangible frisson of feeling between them, something urgent and anxious, but it calms at the first touch of Raelle’s hand on Scylla’s skin. She is, Scylla thinks, on steadier ground here: the fixer doing what she knows best. Her hands are cool and dry, and they move with purpose, starting at the knot between Scylla’s left ear, from where most of the pain is radiating. It dulls in a second, and Raelle’s hands trace their way to a lurid blue-black bruise on Scylla’s shoulder.

And all right, maybe this is calming for _Raelle_. While her hands skim beneath Scylla’s clothes, soothing hurts and sealing up wounds, Scylla lies still and tries not to come out of her skin.

“How did we get to Marblehead?” she asks faintly. Talking still doesn’t seem like a great idea, but if she doesn’t distract herself with _something_ , she thinks she might explode. “And what do you mean, we’re in a summer rental?”

“Abigail drove us here.” Raelle runs her thumb over a cut on Scylla’s collarbone, swiping the skin smooth. “We needed to go somewhere safe, and she said the summer rentals would all be long emptied out by now.”

She leans away from Scylla at last, inspecting her work at a distance.

“So you broke into one?” Scylla tries to hide her amusement, but Raelle catches on and gives her a faint little grin back.

“We… _requisitioned_ it.” Raelle shrugs. “It’s an okay place to lie low for a day or two.” She pauses, not meeting Scylla’s eye. “And I know you like the beach. So there’s that.”

Scylla has to avert her eyes, too. “I do,” she says quietly. She bunches the quilt back over her knees, her hands restless without something to touch. “What happens after a day or two, though?”

She feels Raelle look at her directly, and forces her gaze back up again. It’s strange, so incredibly strange, that this should feel so intimate, so brand-new: they’ve done so much more than look in each other’s eyes while dream-linking, but here, the choice to do so means something. There’s a gravity to it that just can’t exist in the ephemeral space of a dream.

Raelle has that look on her face that Scylla knows means she’s searching for the right words to say. “I’ll tell you everything,” she says at last. “All of it, Scyl, anything you want to know. But before I can do that, I’m gonna need something from you.”

Scylla gives her a little nod. “Whatever you need,” she says.

“I need the truth.” Raelle’s voice is steadier, more sure of itself. “All of it. No ducking out. No holding back. Before I can trust you, I need you to show me why I should.”

And oh, it stings a little, hearing out loud that Raelle still doesn’t quite trust her. But it’s no less than Scylla deserves; and even though what Raelle wants from her is the most terrifying thing _anyone_ could ask her to give, there’s no question of refusing.

There are things that Scylla wants, too. And if this is the price she has to pay for them—well. Time has proven that she’s nothing if not devoted to a cause.

“Whatever you need,” she replies, “it’s yours.”

She thinks, but doesn’t say: _and so am I._

~*~

She showers first, in the tiny bathroom at the end of the hall, while Raelle goes scavenging in the kitchen for food. It’s nearly October, long past Marblehead’s tourist season, but the house still bears evidence of recent use: there’s toilet paper in the bathroom, and half a bar of lavender soap on the edge of the sink. Scylla takes the latter and spends an unrepentant thirty minutes under the spray, shriveling her fingers and using up all the hot water. Her skin feels scalded new, the past week scrubbed off and sent swirling down the drain.

When she returns to her bedroom, her clothes are gone, and in their place, there’s a sweater and a pair of leggings folded neatly at the end of the bed. Both look far too big for her—clearly, they came from somewhere in this house—but the thought of Raelle finding clothes for her has her grinning so wide, she has to bite down on her own lip to contain it.

Raelle is stirring something in a pot on the stove when Scylla wanders into the kitchen. She glances up when she sees Scylla come in, and something about her appearance makes her pause for a second, staring.

“Clothes okay?” she asks, turning her attention back to the stove. It’s probably just the steam rising off the pot— _definitely_ couldn’t be the pure sex appeal of Scylla’s too-big sweater—but she could swear Raelle’s face is red, and that fact makes her feel strangely shy.

“Yeah,” she replies. “Thanks for finding them.”

Raelle shrugs, still not lifting her gaze from the stove. “Yours are in the wash. They’ll probably be dry enough to wear again by dinner.”

“I appreciate it.” After a beat of silence, Scylla adds, “I guess you found something edible in here?” It’s such obvious, lame small talk—the kind of thing they’ve never done, never _needed_ to do, even at the beginning. It makes her cringe, but she can’t stand this stilted awkwardness between them, this silence that feels like it’s pressing down on her chest.

Raelle smiles a little, though, and that makes Scylla feel more confident in her choices. “Yeah,” she says. “There’s, like, a weird amount of canned soup in the pantry. Real doomsday prepper stuff.”

“That _is_ weird.” Judging by the aggressive beach decor, Scylla had this place pegged as some old retired couple’s summer getaway. She can easily picture somebody’s grandma sitting in one of the wicker armchairs in the living room.

“Why, because of the tacky retiree vibe they’ve got going on?” Raelle cuts a look at her, eyes sparkling with mischief in a way that hits Scylla like a punch to the gut. “I guess people contain multitudes.”

It takes Scylla a moment to find her voice to reply. “I guess they do.”

The rain has let up, so they take their bowls out to the porch and eat on the sofa, side by side: not touching and not talking, but this time, the silence feels a little easier. This time, there’s a view to distract them, of a storm-mottled sky and empty beach. The sea puts Scylla back in mind of her dream, with its whitecaps and its fretful thrashing. The rain may have stopped, she thinks, but the storm is biding its time.

She’s stalling, too. She can feel the expectation in Raelle’s silence—knows that it’s time, at last, for her to speak—but there is so much that she wants to say, so much that she needs Raelle to understand, that she has no idea where to even begin.

“I joined the Spree because I had nowhere else to go,” she says at last.

Raelle immediately tenses up beside her. Even with the space between their bodies, Scylla can sense it, and it automatically puts her on high alert. Hurriedly, before her nerve fails her, she plunges on. “I was only sixteen when my parents were killed. I didn’t—I _couldn’t_ collect on any of the Army’s protections for war orphans, because they hadn’t served. They wouldn’t let me say the words till I was of legal age, either. The Spree found me—recruited me, I guess—and took care of me.”

Raelle fiddles with her spoon. “So they could turn you into one of them.” Her tone is carefully neutral, but there’s still tension running through her body. Scylla sneaks a glance at her and sees her still looking away, out in the direction of the sea.

“Yes,” Scylla says. “That was what they wanted.”

Raelle fiddles with her spoon. “Did you know, then? All those things they did? How many people they killed?”

“Yes,” Scylla says again, wincing at the honesty. This is one of the parts she’d really have preferred to skip retelling; there’s nothing about this that paints her in a good light. But she made a promise, so she sucks in a breath and continues: “They told me that there would never be freedom for us, for witches, unless we took it for ourselves. And if that meant we had to kill, well.” She shrugs, swallows. “Sometimes you had to break a few eggs. That’s what they told me. That’s what I believed.”

Raelle turns to face her, then, and Scylla tenses. She can’t bring herself to meet her gaze, so she stares straight in front of her, at the waves. They surge and fall, building and swallowing themselves over and over again, evidence of the nascent storm growing teeth; and again, she thinks of the dream. Of her mother holding her face in her hands, and her father saying _this time, you’re not alone_.

She’d thought he meant Raelle. _Wanted_ him to mean Raelle. But now, in spite of everything that’s happened between them—in spite of the way Raelle kissed her in a dream, in spite of how she saved Scylla’s life—she isn’t so sure. She knows that her past is littered with enough bodies to turn anyone away. That the things she’s done are unforgivable, and worse, she’s not sure she regrets them all. But she can’t keep Raelle without telling her everything, baring every inch of the blood beneath her fingernails, and once Raelle sees it—how could she possibly still love her after that?

“But you don’t believe that anymore,” Raelle says, interrupting her thoughts. “Or do you?” She sounds like she very badly wants for this not to be the case. And Scylla wishes she could assure her of this, assure her that she’s not the monster the Army and the Spree turned her into. But the truth is more complicated than that. More complicated than Scylla herself can understand, most days.

So again, she chooses to tell the truth. Completely, and without inhibition: “It’s hard to explain,” she admits. She finally forces herself to meet Raelle’s gaze, which is steady upon her, unflinching and without judgement or horror. That’s a start. “Can I just show you?”

And with every bit of courage she has left to her name, she reaches for Raelle’s hand.

Raelle doesn’t resist the touch, but she doesn’t move to lace her fingers with Scylla’s, either. The way she watches her is almost wary.

“Scyl, what—”

“Please,” Scylla interrupts. “Just—just let me, okay?”

Raelle hesitates for only a second before giving her a nod.

And so Scylla takes her hand, guides it to her own temple, and gently—lining her fingers up against Raelle’s—presses her fingers into her skin.

~*~

Four years ago, when the Spree took Scylla in, they’d asked her what she was prepared to give to the cause.

_Anything_ , Scylla had replied. _Everything_. Because it was what she knew they wanted to hear, and because it was true. All she’d had to her name then were the clothes on her back and the memory of her parents’ bodies, cooling on the floor of a house they’d barely spent a week in. Easy things, in other words, to promise away.

At sixteen, she’d never dreamed of one day having something more to lose.

Now, Scylla holds Raelle’s fingers firm against her temple and feels the threads of the link grow taut between them. Feels the gentle, inquiring presence of Raelle’s mind against hers, and knows that now, she can see it all. Every truth and every misstep, beginning on that day four years ago: it’s terrifying and it’s liberating and it’s out of her control, but above all it is, she thinks dizzily, the closest she’s ever been to another person. Not even her parents ever caught this glimpse of her soul, which she offers now, freely, to Raelle.

The truth: Scylla had never dreamed of one day having something more to lose, because she’d never dreamed of someone like Raelle.

Scylla concentrates on pushing her memories to the surface, so Raelle will see them in order and know, at last, the entire truth of who she is.

She let the Spree make her into what they wanted. Let them teach her forbidden pieces of Work, things that she knew her parents would have been shocked by. She forgot about her mother’s favorite tenet, the Rule of Three— _always do well, for what you do is returned to you threefold_ —and, at their instruction, sang poison into balloons. The first time she burned someone else’s face into her own, she admired herself in the mirror and thought, _good_. This was the greatest gift the Spree had given her, greater than food or shelter or Work to defend herself with: the opportunity to be somebody else. Somebody other than the girl to whom terrible things had happened.

She told herself that revenge had nothing to do with it. She lied. Oh, she meant it when she said she wanted witches to be free—meant it when she said she didn’t care how many civilians had to die for it to happen—but even if they won their freedom, what would it matter? Her parents were already dead. Freedom, whenever it came, would come too late for them.

To her, the Work she did was simple and transactional. Not dissimilar to the Rule of Three: the world had been cruel to her, so she would be three times as cruel in return.

She feels the warm presence of Raelle in her mind try to disengage—horrified, maybe, just like Scylla had feared. But she pushes down harder on Raelle’s fingers and makes her stay, because even if she hates Scylla after, it’s important that she sees this next part, too.

She loved the Spree because they gave her a home and a purpose. It was a kind of love that came with sharp edges and teeth, with consequences if you failed in any way, but she loved it, because it was _hers_. She didn’t know, then, that a cause could not love her back, and so, in a way, she waited for it to. When she was given her first solo mission, at the mall, she was eager: when the bodies of civilians started hitting the floor, a grotesque symphony of impact, she made herself feel nothing at all. She returned to their headquarters in Vermont and basked in their praise: a promising student, they called her. And in such an important strategic position, a second-year at War College. Their eyes and ears inside Fort Salem.

When they gave her her second mission, she thought, _easy_.

Her instructions were to get close. The Spree didn’t tell her why. She assumed it was because, for one reason or another, Raelle was a likely convert to their cause: she could be another spy for them inside Fort Salem, maybe. Or perhaps their plans for her were bigger. Either way, Raelle was so lonely, lost in her own grief and anger and always on the outside, that it wasn’t hard to draw her in, win her trust.

The first time she kissed Raelle, it was a test. To see if this, perhaps, could be a new way of drawing her in.

The second time she kissed her, it had been because, right after that first kiss, Raelle had pulled back and looked at her. Not at what she could do, or where she could infiltrate, or how many people she could kill with one balloon. Just _her_. A person Scylla hadn’t even known still existed, but whom Raelle seemed to see so clearly.

Raelle looked at her, with her eyes soft and wide with adoration and _wonder_ , like the Scylla she could see was someone astonishing. That was the exact moment it hit Scylla, with the force of a windstrike: a cause couldn’t love her back, but Raelle _could_.

Scylla opens her eyes and sees Raelle looking right back at her, her eyes just like that again: adoration and wonder and something Scylla doesn’t dare name yet, but which tells her that, finally, Raelle understands. That after that kiss, the only war for Scylla was between the Spree and Raelle. Between the only place she felt she could ever belong, and a girl who kissed her in the woods and made her laugh. Who called her _Scyl_ and told her she was beautiful, and touched her so gently that even the memory of it, now, is enough to bring tears to her eyes.

_And I chose you_ , Scylla thinks across the link. _I chose you because you were the only thing that’s ever just been mine. Because you saw who I was, and still saw something in me worth loving. Because I needed something good to believe in, for once, and you are the best thing I’ve ever known._

_That’s the answer to your question. That’s what I believe now._

_I believe in you._

And then the link breaks, so forcefully that, for a terrible second, Scylla thinks that Raelle has finally torn herself away in disgust. But then she feels herself being pulled roughly across the sofa, and Raelle’s arms are around her, clutching Scylla so tightly to her that it hurts. Her tears are falling on Scylla’s shoulder, her chest shaking so hard with sobs that Scylla can feel the vibration of it through her whole body.

She clumsily pushes Scylla away from her just long enough to look into her eyes.

“Okay,” she says, nodding hard through her tears. “Okay.” And that’s just so purely _Raelle_ that Scylla can do nothing but laugh, even with tears running down her own face.

And then Raelle folds her back into her arms, and Scylla, with the part of her brain that’s still lucid, thinks that here is another reason she loves Raelle. The healer in her can still bear to love something as death-touched as Scylla.

She’ll have to remember to tell her that. In person—not through the link. For this, she wants to actually say the words.

~*~

They stay out on the porch for a long time after, too exhausted and content to bother with moving. In the aftermath of the linking, a perfect stillness has grown up between them: a place where there’s no need for words or actions. Where they can just be like this, twined together like it’s the old days and nothing has changed at all.

There will be a need for all those things, eventually. Scylla knows there’s still so much more for them to talk through, so many hard conversations between them and normal. But this—Raelle’s head tucked beneath her chin, her face buried in the crook of Scylla’s neck—is already so much more than she had dared to hope for. The flame in her chest blazes brightly, but she no longer thinks of it as something with the potential to burn her from within.

She just thinks of it as _warm_.

They’re in such a hazy state that they don’t even notice when Anacostia shows up. Scylla is running her fingers through Raelle’s braids, watching a pair of gulls down on the beach try and fly into a headwind, when Raelle presses the point of her nose hard against her neck, and moans sleepily.

“I don’t want to move,” she grumbles.

“Sorry,” Anacostia’s voice cuts in dryly, “but I’m really gonna have to ask that you _do_.”

Which, of course, completely scares the shit out of them both. Raelle springs off of Scylla so fast that she somehow manages to fall off the sofa, landing hard on the rain-slicked porch.

“What the _hell_ ,” she snaps.

Anacostia is standing on the bottom step of the porch, wearing, of all possible disguises, a _tracksuit._ She looks actually winded, as though her dedication to her cover might have actually involved running, and is clearly deeply unimpressed with the both of them. “I’d like to say I trained you better than that, Collar,” she says, and Scylla can hear the note of fondness buried beneath all that drill-sergeant sternness.

Raelle apparently doesn’t hear it, or doesn’t care; she glares, wiping rainwater off her pants as she climbs to her feet. “Yeah, well, you didn’t say when you were coming.”

“Neither do the Spree, generally.” Anacostia eyeballs Scylla mistrustfully, as if this whole awkward situation is somehow _her_ fault. Which, fine, it _partially_ is. But it’s not like Scylla didn’t have help.

She opens her mouth to retort, but Raelle beats her to it. “Scylla’s not Spree anymore,” she says shortly. “And we should probably take this conversation inside.”

Anacostia lifts a her eyebrows at Scylla in question. Scylla just shrugs. It’s strange to hear it said out loud— _Scylla’s not Spree anymore_ —even though, she supposes, it’s been true for several days now.

Stranger still is how the thought of that doesn’t frighten her at all.

Raelle leads them all back into the living room, where Anacostia regards the decor with a level of dispassion Scylla doesn’t think even the worst new recruits ever see from her. She gingerly sits down in the wicker rocking chair, which unfortunately gives her a clear view of the wreath hanging over the sofa—the one that says BEACH in letters made of fake sailing rope. Her scowl deepens.

“You girls on vacation or something?” she drawls.

Raelle tugs Scylla down to sit beside her on the couch. She gives Anacostia a withering look; Scylla’s pretty sure not even Bellweather would be brave enough for that. “You know we aren’t,” she says.

“Then you’d better have a _really_ good reason for being here right now. And an even better one for dragging me into it.”

Raelle shrugs, feigning nonchalance. “We need your help.”

“Yeah? Well, the last time you needed my help, I got Bellweather coming to me in the morning for demerits, saying she couldn’t convince you to actually come back with her.”

Scylla reaches for Raelle’s hand and squeezes it, even though they’re in full view of Anacostia. She’s rewarded by Raelle turning, just slightly, and giving her a small, grateful look before refocusing her attention on Anacostia.

“Did Abigail tell you about our plan?”

“She told me _you_ have a plan. The terrible plan, I think she called it.”

“And?”

Anacostia snorts and shakes her head. “I’ve seen what happens when someone tries to bet against you, Collar.” She claps her hands together, the sound ringing loud through the tiny living room. “I’ll help you if I can. But there’s a couple of things I still don’t understand.”

Raelle nods tightly. “Okay,” she says. “Like what?”

Anacostia leans back in the rocking chair and studies the two of them frankly. Scylla’s reminded, yet again, of what a mystery she is, in all this. She knows there’s a lot that Raelle hasn’t told her yet, but there’s also certain fundamental truths she thought she knew about Anacostia. Her relationship with Alder, for one: Scylla can maybe understand, a little, why she would betray that relationship and let an enemy agent go free. But she doesn’t understand why Anacostia keeps sticking her neck out, again and again, for a group of cadets whom she’d be better off dismissing as a bunch of lost causes.

“Like this thing Abigail was calling the witchbomb,” Anacostia says, breaking through her thoughts. “Alder told me what happened—what she _saw_ —in the Altai Mountains, but I still don’t understand it.”

To Scylla’s surprise, Raelle grabs her hand again. A look of deep concentration comes over her face, and instantly, an answering warmth spreads through Scylla’s fingers. It feels nice, in a strange sort of way, but when she looks down, black tendrils of smoke are curling around the place where their fingers touch.

She yanks her hand away fast, but Raelle doesn’t seem to mind. “This is a witchbomb,” she says. “The beginning of one, anyway.”

Anacostia stares at their empty hands, side by side on the couch, and says nothing.

“I touched the mother mycelium in the Necro facility,” Raelle continues. Which is not something Scylla had been aware of, and sends her mind spinning: the mother mycelium by nature isn’t something you can _touch_. “The Spree—my mom—had an ex-military Necro specialist on hand who said she thought the thing might have put down roots in me and given me some of its power. I can’t get hurt—not by an attack from a human, anyway—and sometimes this happens.”

She shakes her hand out ruefully. Anacostia’s eyes narrow.

“Why’d you have to hold her hand for that, then?” she asks.

Here, Raelle falters just a bit. “I don’t know,” she admits. “The first time the witchbomb happened, I was linked with Abigail. And then again, when we rescued Scylla from the Spree—” She shakes her head. “My mom wanted me to learn how to use the witchbomb. How to harness it for _her_. But she always made me do it alone, and I think—I think that kind of power might be too much for one person to generate. I think it needs two people, or maybe even more than that, to carry it together.”

Scylla can’t take her eyes off of Raelle’s face. She looks so weary and drawn, just from the retelling. Scylla longs to take her back out to the porch and hold her again, to shut out Anacostia and every terrible thing that’s happened over the past month. But the power in her girl’s hands, which even now look so small and delicate, is too tremendous to ignore; it sits heavily between them on the sofa.

Anacostia has been silent too, till now. She clears her throat, and with unexpected awkwardness says, “It’s powerful, then. The witchbomb.”

Raelle doesn’t reply. Her eyes look glazed over, like she’s decided to succumb to her exhaustion after all.

Scylla answers for her. “It leveled an entire house and killed all the Spree agents there. That was just with two of us.” She does not add that they were barely touching hands—that hers were bound up tight, that she’d grabbed Raelle’s without even thinking about it. How easy that much power was, how _thoughtlessly_ they were able to wreak that much death and destruction, is too frightening to think about, let alone say.

Anacostia lets out a long, heavy breath. “So this is your way out, Collar?” she asks.

For a second, Scylla thinks Raelle’s gone completely catatonic, but then she looks back up, meeting Anacostia’s eyes directly.

“My mom wanted to use this power to leverage an alliance with the Army,” she says. “Way I see it, it’s _my_ power. And there’s things I need from the Army, too.”

And Scylla’s been out of the loop for a lot of this conversation—something she doesn’t blame Raelle for at all—but this, she understands as completely and instantly as a slap to the face. Still, the word _no_ bubbles up to her lips, on instinct. No, that can’t possibly be right. No, Raelle _wouldn’t_.

Her mind flashes back to the conversation she overheard this morning between Abigail and Raelle. The references to _your terrible plan_ , which Anacostia seems to know about, too. The strange thing Abigail said, about bringing Scylla to Fort Salem. Raelle asking Abigail for her help— _don’t do it for Scylla_ , she’d said, _do it for Tally._

And it all comes together—every terrible piece falling into place. The things Raelle wants from the Army are for _her_. Her, and Tally, and maybe even Abigail, too: all of them have something they need protecting from, and Raelle has something the Army wants.

If it were anyone else in the world, maybe Scylla wouldn’t jump to conclusions. But it’s _Raelle_ , and because it’s Raelle, Scylla knows without a doubt: she’s going to throw herself at Alder’s mercy to save her friends. To save Scylla, who damn well doesn’t deserve it. Because that’s who Raelle is.

That’s the girl Scylla’s in love with.

She feels Raelle’s eyes on her. “Scylla,” she says carefully. “Scyl, wait—”

But Scylla just shakes her head. “No,” she says, her voice ringing loud, louder than she’d intended, through the small space. “No, I—I can’t.”

She’s out the back door, across the porch, and halfway down to the beach before Raelle has a chance to try and call her back. For all that she just said she couldn’t, Scylla knows: if Raelle were to summon her back right now, she’d be helpless to do anything but go.

~*~

It feels like a long time passes, but Raelle does, eventually, come find her.

Scylla hasn’t gone far—just straight down the beach and right up to the water line, her shoes practically touching the surf. She’d considered for a moment just making a run for it: giving in to the reliable temptation, always just below the surface, to burn her bridges and _go_. But in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to. Not only does the prospect of leaving Raelle feel insurmountable (more so, even, than watching her sign herself away to the Army), but that thing Raelle said to her months ago still rings true. There’s nowhere in the world she can hide. Nowhere in the world that’s safe, for witches.

Everything that’s happened since Raelle dragged her out of the ruins of the Spree house has felt a little surreal. In such a short time, Scylla’s managed to forget that, for all that this ought to feel like freedom—a house on the beach with Raelle, like they’d dreamed of—she’s no less trapped than she was at Fort Salem. No more free than she was as a good little soldier girl, chatting with balloons in her mirror by night.

So she sits at the lip of the shore, watching bruise-colored clouds blow furiously toward the beach, resigned to waiting for Raelle to come and find her. Either the conversation with Anacostia is running long (and Scylla doesn’t want to think about what that might mean), or Raelle is giving her space; in any case, it’s a while before she feels a body settle in beside her on the sand, and a warm hand cup the back of her neck.

“I’m sorry,” Raelle says. Her thumb traces little circles against the edge of Scylla’s jaw. And Scylla’s still angry—still raging on the inside with an inferno of grief, anger, and terrible, painful love—but she’s been putty in Raelle’s hands since the very beginning, and she relaxes, just a bit, into her touch.

“For what?” she asks, directing her question to the thrashing sea. The storm is closing in tighter by the second; Scylla can’t tell if the water on her face is sea spray or the beginnings of rain. Probably they should both go back, get inside, but she makes no move to get up.

“Not telling you everything before Anacostia got here.” Raelle drops her hand from Scylla’s neck and reaches for her hand instead. Scylla lets her take it. Lets her avoid her gaze by studying the way their fingers fit together. “You didn’t deserve to hear it like that.”

“I’m not mad that you didn’t tell me.”

Raelle looks up at her. “But you _are_ mad,” she says simply.

And Scylla is suddenly tired, so unbelievably goddamn _exhausted_ , of the constant pain and anger and strife between them. It’s like they’re magnets for it, repelling everything good—didn’t that beautiful moment on the porch after they linked disappear so quickly? “I’m not mad,” she says, even though it’s a pathetically flimsy lie. Even though she _knows_ Raelle will call her on it.

Which she does, with a gentle squeeze of Scylla’s hand that’s somehow both a reproof and a reassurance. “Can we make it a rule,” she says, “that we don’t lie to each other from here on out?”

And Scylla knows that even though Raelle’s not condemning her—even though she _could_ ; Scylla’s lies far outnumber her own—she feels she has no choice but to agree. This, too, is something she needs to do if she wants to keep Raelle. And given Raelle’s terrible plan (Scylla never thought she’d agree with Abigail on, well, _anything_ , but the name is apt), that’s going to be hard enough to do already.

“I don’t want you to make the deal with Alder,” she says, all in a rush. “I don’t want you to sell yourself out to them. _Especially_ not for me.”

It’s at that moment that the rain finally starts: huge, fat drops turning the beach darker around them. Raelle doesn’t even seem to notice or care. She’s pinning Scylla with her gaze, and while it’s not _angry_ , exactly, it still makes Scylla freeze up like a deer in headlights.

“What is it about this that you’re not _getting_?” she says at last. And yes, there’s heat behind her words, but still no anger. It’s frustration, and it’s pain, and it’s—

“Look, Scyl, I love you.” It’s the first time she’s said it in a long time—the first time outside of a dream-link, anyway—and Scylla’s heart instantly starts beating faster. “Even after all the shit that’s happened, all the things we’ve done to each other. I love you because I choose to keep loving you.” Raelle shakes her head, still heedless of the rain, which is starting to soak through her clothes and run down her face. Scylla notices, for the first time, that her own clothes are sticking to her, as well. “And choosing to love you means choosing to save you. No matter what it takes.”

Her eyes are blazing, the only bright spots in a world gone over to shades of gray. Thunder rumbles, alarmingly close, but still, neither of them moves. Raelle’s hair is plastered against her head in wet ropes, and her jaw is set in that way Scylla recognizes, which means she’s pissed off and trying not to be. She looks a complete, sodden mess, and she takes Scylla’s breath away.

“I know you made that choice for me.” She’s straining to be heard now over the storm and the crash of the waves, voice loud and overwhelmingly intense. “You can’t ask me not to make it, too.”

Scylla shakes her head. She won’t start crying again, she thinks, she _won’t_. It’s altogether amazing that she still has more tears in her, after today.

“Then you can’t ask me to lose you again!” she shouts. Under the pounding of the rain and the thunder of the surf and the crack of lightning that briefly throws them both into harsh light, her words sound broken and weak, even as they scrape her throat on the way out. She feels, in a way, as desperate as the storm. If someone unleashed her on the world right now, she thinks she might leave it in ruins.

But the look Raelle is giving her is soft, so soft, that it makes something inside of her go still.

“You won’t lose me.” Raelle’s shouting back now, too, but unlike Scylla’s, her voice sounds strong. “You go where I go, remember?”

And she seizes Scylla roughly by the back of her head, drawing their mouths together.

It ought to be an absolute disaster of a kiss: their teeth bump with the force of it, and rainwater slips from their noses and eyelashes onto their lips. It ought to be an absolute disaster, but it’s not. It’s Raelle’s hands on the back of her neck, holding her firmly in place; its her teeth biting and pulling at Scylla’s lower lip, and the fire that licks its way through Scylla’s veins at her touch. It’s the column of Raelle’s spine beneath Scylla’s fingers as she scrabbles for something to ground her, and the wet sand that’s clinging to their clothes, and the thunder and the rain that’s coming down harder than ever, but Scylla could swear she doesn’t feel it. All she feels is Raelle.

When they finally break apart, Raelle touches her forehead to Scylla’s. They’re both breathing heavily, but Raelle manages to gasp out, “Can we—?”

And Scylla doesn’t give her a chance to finish. “ _Yes_ ,” she says. “Please.”

***

They somehow make it back to the beach house—impeded in part by the downpour, and in part by the way Raelle keeps stopping in the middle of it to kiss her senseless.

“I missed this,” she murmurs against Scylla’s lips. They’re about five feet from shelter; Raelle has her pressed up against the porch railing, her cold hands slipping up under Scylla’s sweater. She has rainwater on her lips and Scylla decides fuck the storm, actually, and tugs Raelle’s head back down for another kiss.

They eventually make it in the door, and by the time they do, Scylla’s positively drunk with sensation. Her whole body feels like it’s been touched by a live wire, skin warm to the touch despite the wet clothes. She can’t seem to keep her hands of Raelle,either—has just enough presence of mind to kick off her wet shoes and socks and the door before her mind flips neatly back to pure instinct, and gets lost in the feeling of Raelle under her fingers, Raelle’s lips on her neck, Raelle’s breath in her ear.

It’s burning her up, all this touch. Threatening to engulf her from the inside out—every point of contact with Raelle sends fire lancing through her veins, pooling liquid between her legs. But it isn’t like before, when she was afraid of being consumed. What Raelle wakes up in her is a phoenix kind of fire, and Scylla wants, _needs_ it to swallow her whole. To burn away all that she was before, and make her into something new.

“Please,” she gasps into Raelle’s mouth. She doesn’t even know what she’s asking for, exactly, but Raelle gives a breathy little sigh at her request and moves to lave her tongue against the pulse point on her neck. So encouraged, Scylla asks again: “Raelle, _please_.”

Raelle nips at the soft skin behind her ear, and a helpless little whimper escapes from Scylla’s throat. She can _feel_ Raelle grin against her neck, the bastard, before hearing her hum, “Tell me what you want, Scyl,” right against the shell of her ear.

Scylla grabs hold of Raelle’s hips and brings them flush against hers. They both groan a little, at that, and Scylla has to catch her breath before saying, “You. Just you. Right now.”

Raelle huffs a laugh right against her ear, making her shiver. “Okay,” she whispers, and then, without any further warning, she swoops Scylla up into her arms and backs her up into the kitchen. Scylla hears something hit the floor with a metallic _thunk_ , but doesn’t have time to wonder what it is before she’s lifted onto the kitchen counter, and Raelle is nudging her legs apart to stand between them.

There’s a fever in Raelle’s eyes, but a gentleness in her hands, which are pushing up the hem of Scylla’s rain-sodden sweater. Scylla nods, and Raelle, with shaking fingers, tugs it clumsily off of her and flings it over one of the dining room chairs.

She hisses with approval when she sees Scylla’s newly bared skin—a decadent little sound that hits Scylla low in her belly. “ _Jesus_ , Scyl,” she says, as if this is the first time she’s ever seen her like this. And then her lips are on Scylla’s rain-wet skin, burning a path with teeth and tongue across her collarbone and down to her breasts. She puts her mouth on a nipple and Scylla cries out, unable to find it in her to be ashamed of the sound, or of the violent way her fingernails are digging into Raelle’s shoulders. She just spreads her legs wider, drawing Raelle closer, and holds her more firmly in place.

Raelle touches her slowly, some of her earlier fervor cooling into something much more intense. Her fingers and her mouth take languorous stock of Scylla—the thin skin over her rib cage and the dip between her breasts, the spot just beneath her navel that makes her go liquid in Raelle’s arms. She helps Scylla fumble her way out of her leggings and makes the same unhurried inspection of her hip bones, kissing and biting at her witch-mark until Scylla is squirming again.

“Raelle,” she pleads. She wraps her legs around Raelle’s waist, trying to hold her in the cradle of her pelvis. Trying to arch enough that she can grind her hips against Raelle’s, get some kind of relief from the pressure that’s been slowly, torturously building ever since Raelle kissed her out in the rain.

She couldn’t have imagined even a few days ago that Raelle would ever want her like this again. The fact that she does is overwhelming enough to send a fresh bolt of heat between her legs; to make her moan and bury her face in Raelle’s neck.

Raelle kisses her ear. “Easy,” she murmurs. “I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s not quite the truth, but it’s also not exactly a lie. Not in the way Raelle had meant it when she said _we don’t lie to each other_. This is something different, entirely for Scylla’s benefit: a beautiful half-truth to ground her in the moment. Scylla’s been so afraid of all this slipping away, it never occurred to her that Raelle might be afraid of that, too.

It certainly explains the way Raelle’s mapping out her body, fingers and tongue intent like she’ll be graded later on her thoroughness. Scylla reaches up weakly to place a hand on the side of her face, forcing Raelle to look back up at her. “You too, then,” she gasps out; Raelle, the aforementioned _bastard_ , has taken advantage of her distraction to run her knuckles right over Scylla’s center, right over the place where she’s soaked through her underwear. “I’m— _fuck_ —not either—Raelle, _fuck!”_

And Raelle smiles at her—the first true, uninhibited smile she’s seen on her in a while. The kind that makes her whole face look lit up from within. She surges up to kiss Scylla again, harder this time, and then they both get lost in it: making out urgently, their hips rocking into each other in a chaotic, disjointed rhythm till Scylla slows down, leaning her forehead against Raelle’s and gasping to catch her breath.

“I’m—” she struggles. “If you don’t—”

And Raelle understands, because of course she does. Scylla’s never been one to hold out for very long when Raelle’s the one making her feel this good. And especially not now, when it’s been so long for both of them. When there was so much evidence that this would never happen again.

Raelle peels herself back from Scylla, and with trembling, unsteady hands, divests herself of her clothes. Scylla attempts to help, but her hands feel boneless, wide and clumsy, and she ends up making things more complicated till they’re both giggling hysterically. Then the last of Raelle’s clothes gets thrown carelessly aside, and her grin turns _filthy_ , and she presses herself fully against Scylla, skin to skin.

Scylla’s body reacts like a bowstring that’s been pulled taut: her body arches into Raelle’s, and her head falls back against the kitchen cabinets with a long, drawn-out moan. She can’t believe they’re actually doing this. Can’t believe she can reach for Raelle and touch every bit of newly-exposed skin within reach—her shoulders and her neck, the small swell of her breasts, her flat stomach and toned abs. Can’t believe they’re fucking on the kitchen counter of a stranger’s tacky beach house, while rain batters at the windows and staccato bursts of white lightning make the house pulse with an eerie glow.

She thinks, through the haze of lust clouding her mind, that she would happily go through it all again—every second of it—if it led her back to this moment.

Then Raelle slips her fingers underneath the waistband of her panties, and Scylla loses all ability to think at all. Can only stare, mesmerized, into Raelle’s eyes, crying out and jerking her hips as her fingers slip inside her.

Raelle’s watching her back, gaze intent as she stokes the fire in Scylla hotter and hotter. She presses her thumb against Scylla’s clit, and when Scylla cries out and slams her fist against the kitchen counter, Raelle’s eyes lower and her head tips back, as if she can feel what Scylla’s feeling.

“ _Baby_ ,” she hums, and _oh_ , that’s new. The answering rush of heat between Scylla’s legs tells her pretty fucking clearly that it’s a good kind of new, though. “Tell me.”

Scylla is about a foot from the edge—fire licking up the column of her spine, threading its way out to all of her extremities, settling low in her belly. When she remembers how to speak, she blurts out, “Your mouth, Raelle, _please_ ,” without shame.

And Raelle obliges. She gets on her knees—the image alone making Scylla whine and buck her hips—and pushes her underwear aside, laying the flat of her tongue on the hot, swollen flesh underneath. It’s pretty much over from there: Raelle’s tongue picks up a relentless rhythm, and her fingers match it, curling inside Scylla as her hips rise desperately to meet it. Their bodies demonstrate for them all the things they haven’t forgotten in the time they’ve been apart, and still the fire builds and builds and then, Raelle’s lips close around her clit and it _explodes_ into particles of white-hot pleasure, pulsing through her entire body.

Scylla gasps her name, _Raelle Raelle Raelle_ , as she lets the fire consume her; as she lets it make her into someone new.

***

When Scylla wakes the next morning, it’s to golden, early-autumn sunlight spilling across the room, and the sound of a heartbeat calm and steady right beneath her ear.

She blinks sleepily and takes in her surroundings. She’s in the same room she woke up in yesterday—she recognizes the starfish quilt, which has somehow become tangled around her legs. Her right arm and leg are thrown across Raelle’s body, and her head is on Raelle’s chest; when she tips her head at just the right angle, she can see Raelle looking down at her.

“Hey, beautiful,” she drawls.

Her eyes are doing that thing Scylla loves, scrunched up tight and sparkling with mischief. Scylla hums contentedly and angles so she can press a kiss to the hollow of Raelle’s throat.

“Was I fighting in my sleep again?” she asks, kicking the quilt where it’s bunched around her.

Raelle nods mock-gravely, her chin bumping against the top of Scylla’s head. “It was a good fight,” she intones, pitching her voice to sound like Anacostia’s, low and serious. “You laid waste to all our enemies and brought glory to your— _ahh!”_

She dissolves into startled laughter, because in one swift move, Scylla has rolled over to straddle her, grabbing hold of her wrists and pressing them down into the mattress. Scylla giggles at the sound she makes, letting her eyes indulgently drink in the sight of Raelle: naked and stretched out languorously beneath her. She looks softer, younger somehow—maybe it’s the temporary absence of the weight of the world from her shoulders.

Scylla’s determined to keep her like this for as long as she possibly can.

“I can think of something I’d like to lay to waste,” she husks, leaning down and taking Raelle’s lower lip between her teeth.

Raelle arches up to meet her, freeing one of her wrists from Scylla’s grip so she can settle it on the back of Scylla’s neck. She kisses her with that smile still on her face, and for a second, Scylla thinks she’s actually succeeded. But then Raelle pulls away, shaking her head apologetically.

“We have to get up,” she says, scratching lightly at the base of Scylla’s scalp like she can offset the disappointment with her touch. “They’ll be here soon.”

_They_ being the transport back to Fort Salem. Anacostia had promised Raelle: if her appeal to Alder for a meeting was successful, someone would come and get them from the beach house. For a second, Scylla allows herself to selfishly hope that things weren’t a success. That nobody is coming for them. That the world will just have to wage its wars without them while they spend the rest of the morning in bed.

But the world _can’t_ wage its wars without them—without Raelle, anyway—and wishing and pretending won’t change that fact. Resigned, Scylla rolls off of Raelle and lets her get up and start hunting for her clothes.

“What happens after they get here?” she asks quietly. They’d talked about it a little last night (although _not_ talking had repeatedly proven itself a more interesting use of their time), but Scylla still doesn’t know how Raelle thinks this is going to go. All she knows is that what they’re doing here is a huge, possibly insane gambit, and there’s absolutely no way of knowing how good their chances are.

It terrifies her, the not-knowing. Scylla has never been one for surprises.

Raelle seems to get that, though. Seems to understand, too, that Scylla doesn’t want to hear the plan rehashed so much as she wants something not even Raelle can give her: assurance that it will be all right in the end. So instead, she catches Scylla’s face between her palms and kisses her, long and slow and gentle.

“I love you,” she says, pressing her forehead against Scylla’s when they finally break apart. “So fucking much. And I don’t know what’s going to happen in there, with Alder, but I _do_ know that I’m gonna do everything I can to keep you safe. To keep _all_ of us safe,” she adds, seeing the look in Scylla’s eyes. “Okay?”

And Scylla has to marvel at how perfectly Raelle understands her. She’s not asking for Scylla to believe in her terrible plan, or even to believe that this will all have a good ending. All she’s asking is that Scylla believes in the one thing she’s already promised to believe in.

Scylla knows she can do that much, at least.

So she steals another kiss and holds Raelle in it for a long moment before letting her go.

“I love you,” she says. It means: _okay_.

~*~

Their escort arrives promptly at eleven o’clock, in a car with tinted windows and Army license plates. They’re carefully expressionless as they usher Scylla and Raelle into the back seat, and spend the entire twenty-minute drive to Fort Salem ignoring them entirely. Scylla doesn’t know if they’re aware of who they’re transporting—an ex-Spree agent and her resurrected girlfriend—or if they’re just under orders to have limited contact with them. Either way, it’s an uncomfortably silent ride, to the point where the sight of Fort Salem coming up ahead is almost a relief.

The woods surrounding the base have started to take on the burning hues of fall, but apart from that, it looks much the same as when Scylla left it. The thought doesn’t bring her much comfort. This has never been a safe place for her—not the idea of it, when she was a child caught in the undertow of her parents’ bid for freedom, and not the reality, when she was old enough to say the words. Letting herself be escorted right up the path to the main building—where all the top brass, including Alder, have their offices—feels like pretty solid proof that she’s lost her mind.

But her time at Fort Salem yielded one good thing, and it’s holding her hand in the back seat of the car, rubbing circles into the side of her thumb. Scylla has to believe that that makes all the difference.

“You ready?” Raelle asks. Their handlers have already exited the car and are waiting at attention on either side of the footpath that cuts through the parade grounds. The truthful answer is _no_ , but Scylla’s not so stupid as to believe Raelle’s actually asking, or that her answer could actually make a difference right now.

So she squeezes Raelle’s hand and makes the first move to get out.

The parade grounds are unsettlingly empty for this time of day. That means there’s nobody around to stare as they’re marched up the path to the building, which is good. But there’s no one even out jogging the perimeter—no sound of drill sergeants’ voices further afield—and that raises Scylla’s hackles.

Raelle seems to pick up on her discomfort, because she leans in and whispers, “They probably made everyone clear out. Didn’t want anyone to see the two of us coming back here.”

Scylla gives her a weak smile and tries to calm her trembling hands.

Inside, it’s similarly deserted: a big, cavernous entry hall draped in tapestries, making the whole place feel hushed and quiet and cool. One of their handlers ushers them down the hall, and Raelle gives Scylla’s hand a final squeeze before reluctantly letting it drop. They had agreed before they left the beach house that the less Alder knows about their personal lives, the better.

They come to a stop at an unmarked door. One of their handlers gives a staccato three-knock, then pushes open the door without waiting for a response. And then suddenly, Scylla and Raelle are being nudged inside, and their handlers are gone, melting back into the hall without a word; the door clicks shut behind them, and they’re alone in the belly of the beast.

_Alone_ probably being the wrong word.

“Private Collar,” Alder says dryly. She doesn’t acknowledge Scylla at all. “I confess, I hadn’t expected to ever see you again. And certainly not under such…unusual circumstances.”

From the corner of her eye, Scylla sees Raelle raise her head to meet Alder’s gaze head-on. Alder’s sitting at her desk, which, like everything else in this room, is enormous. And, like everything else in this room, it’s hard at first to get a sense of that size, because every inch of free space is covered with potted plants. They crowd in the corners and drip from hanging planters on the ceiling, vines crawling like long, sinister fingers to wrap around the window frames. Their blooms explode along the windowsills, the scent of them thick and cloying and filling the entire room. It looks more like a greenhouse than the private office of the most famous military leader in history; and yet, the incongruousness of the room does nothing to affect the way Alder carries herself within it. She sits ramrod straight, arms folded across the top of her desk, her expression betraying nothing. To her left, Abigail stands with Anacostia, both of them looking distinctly uncomfortable; at her back, fanned out in a semicircle, her Biddies stand at attention.

Scylla notices Tally among the Biddies at the same time Raelle does; she hears Raelle give a choked little cry and then smother it just as swiftly. Scylla’s heart leaps into her mouth—not just for Raelle’s pain; she always liked Tally—and she sees that Alder has heard it, too. She lifts her eyebrows at Raelle.

“General Alder.” Scylla hears Raelle fight to get her voice under control, but by the time she speaks again, she sounds stronger and more sure of herself. “The circumstances _have_ been pretty unusual.”

Alder lets a long pause linger between them before replying. “Sergeant Quartermaine tells me you have a proposition you’d like to share. As well as—information, was it?—about our would-be friends the Spree.”

She emphasizes the words _would-be friends_. There’s a challenge there, but Raelle, for once, doesn’t rise to meet it. Scylla’s so proud of her for that alone she thinks her heart might explode. “Yes,” Raelle says. “That’s right. Information’s all the way from the top of command, and I’ve got something to offer along with it.”

Alder’s expression twists for just a flash of a moment before settling back into its smooth, neutral setting. “Not an offer on behalf of the Spree, I hope,” she says lightly. “I’m sure you’re familiar with our policy on dealing with terrorists, even in these, shall we say, _unprecedented_ times.” She turns her gaze directly on Raelle, pinning her to the spot with it before flicking her gaze pointedly over to Scylla. “I had concerns about where your loyalties might lie when I heard about your involvement with this one. And now Private Bellweather tells me the Spree chain of command is looking rather…familiar.”

Scylla can’t help but glance at Abigail, who’s visibly wincing. When she sees Scylla looking at her, though, she scowls.

“Yeah, we all know my mom’s Spree.” Raelle’s tone is even, but becoming more heated. Scylla wishes she could grab hold of her hand. “And yeah, she extracted us from China because she wanted to bring me in. But she wanted something else.”

And then _she_ grabs hold of Scylla’s hand. Scylla automatically interlaces their fingers and watches as Raelle screws her eyes shut in concentration, anxious even though they practiced this.

The entire room’s attention being fixed on her isn’t helping with that, either.

But then, right on cue, the black tendrils of smoke begin to curl around their fingers, and Scylla chances a look at Alder to gauge her reaction. It’s dumbstruck, but there’s something else there, as well. Something Scylla would go so far as to describe as _hungry_.

Raelle lets go of her hand. “That’s the witchbomb,” she says simply. “My mom wanted it for the Spree, so she could force your hand in making an alliance. Seemed to think you’d need this kind of power to use against the Camarilla.” She hesitates only for a second before adding, “So I want to make that offer instead.”

The Biddies all hiss in unison, making Scylla jump. Her eyes fall on Tally, whose teeth are clenched halfheartedly; she looks apologetic about it. Alder, meanwhile, just looks _amused_.

“Private Collar,” she says, “you are a conscripted soldier in the U.S. Army. Your skills, however admirable, aren’t something you can _choose_ to offer or withhold.”

She sounds so _smug_ , so completely sure of her power, that Scylla’s hands involuntarily clench into fists. Because this is exactly what she was afraid of—the squeaky wheel on the terrible plan. Alder has no reason to make a deal for something she feels she already owns.

Of course, she _doesn’t_ own Raelle—not yet—but having to tell her that is walking on extremely dangerous ground.

Which, luckily, Raelle has no qualms about. “Actually,” she replies, “my file lists me as KIA. Which would release me from my conscription.”

“A detail that we will _correct_ , now that it’s clear you were not.”

“But even if that weren’t valid,” Raelle continues, as if Alder hasn’t spoken, “I don’t think you _could_ stop me from leaving, if I wanted to.”

Her tone is just this side of insolent, just a hair out of line, but the effect on Alder’s face is instantaneous: her eyes flash, and her expression screws up tight. All the Biddies hiss again, and even though Scylla’s ready for it this time, it’s still a little bit terrifying.

“ _Excuse_ me, Private—”

Raelle flicks her hand in Abigail’s direction; Abigail looks pained, but after a second’s hesitation, unfurls her scourge and lashes it as Raelle with all her might. It flies backward, rebounding toward Abigail, who, luckily, knows to be ready for it: she steps out of its path just in time, leaving it to land heavy on one of the potted plants, instead. There’s a weak little _crack_ as it breaks down the middle, dirt spilling across the carpet.

“Scourges can’t touch me.” Raelle sounds just a little bit pleased with herself. She’s either heedless of the shock and fury on Alder’s face, or just playing with fire for the hell of it, which Scylla kind of loves. “Windstrikes, either. None of it. I walked out of a Spree base with twenty agents on my tail, and not one of them could stop me. What makes you think you can?”

Scylla holds her breath; Raelle’s sashayed right across the line from disrespect to full insubordination, but Alder just leans back in her chair and studies her.

Raelle turns and catches her eye, and even though it’s maybe not the smartest move—Alder’s clearly already put off that she’s there—Scylla gives her a little nod. Nothing for it. Time to move to negotiations.

“I’m willing to give you what you want.” Raelle’s voice is softer now, more conciliatory. “But your Army’s taken a _lot_ from me, and if I’m going to be your weapon, they need to give me something back first.” She falters slightly at Alder’s unresponsiveness. “Will you, uh—will you hear my terms?”

Alder gives a single, tight nod. There’s a muscle jumping warningly in her jaw, but Raelle either doesn’t see it or isn’t dissuaded by it. She jerks her chin in Tally’s direction.

“You let her go,” she says. “Let her go and take someone else.”

The Biddies all turn their heads to Alder in unison. Scylla thinks it might be a reproach—a kind of nonverbal _can you believe this shit?_ —but Alder, to her surprise, says, “Done,” without hesitation. “She made no formal vows to me. I can have her restored as soon as Sergeant Quartermaine finds me a suitable alternate.”

Someone exhales audibly with relief. For a minute, Scylla thinks it’s Raelle, but then everyone in the room turns to Abigail, who instantly goes bright red. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “Clearing my throat.”

Raelle shakes her head a little, then leaps right into it again, dogged. “I want any demerits Abigail got in the last week to be taken off her record.”

Alder waves a hand at that, bored. “Fine. Anything else?” Her voice is still tight, barely containing her anger. Scylla wonders if it’s been over three hundred years since anyone spoke to her this way.

She doesn’t doubt that if anyone were to be the first, it would be Raelle.

Raelle darts a quick look at Scylla, holding eye contact with her as long as they both dare. This, Scylla knows, is their biggest gamble. The one that may end up sinking their whole operation.

The one Raelle refused to compromise on.

“I want a full pardon for Scylla,” she says.

Alder cocks her head at Raelle as if she’s just spoken in another language—one Alder understands, but which takes her a moment to mentally translate. “ _Absolutely_ not,” she says when she finds her voice. _Are you out of your mind?_ is implied.

Scylla’s heart sinks, but Raelle—Raelle doesn’t even hesitate. “Then there’s no deal,” she says. “I walk. I’m sure my mother and the Spree can still use me for something.”

Alder stands up at her desk in one swift movement, and Scylla sees Raelle visibly flinch. She has to bite down, hard, on the inside of her cheek to remind her this isn’t something she can protect Raelle from. Not without making the whole situation worse.

“You presume that your gifts are _necessary_ to defeating the Camarilla,” Alder seethes, raising her voice. “Might I remind you, Private, that I wiped them out once before without you.”

“And they came back smarter!” Raelle shouts. “They came back more advanced! You saw that yourself in China!”

“Nevertheless, we can win this war without you.” Alder moves as though to wave her out of the room—or strike her, maybe, remembering just in time that she can’t be hit. But Raelle’s breathing hard, her jaw set at that familiar angle, that fire in her eyes that means trouble. Usually trouble for _Raelle_ , but this time, Scylla wouldn’t bet against her.

It honestly impresses her, in a way—how her girl doesn’t hesitate to pick fights with bigger, stronger people.

“Can you, though?” Raelle’s voice is quiet, but heavy with menace. “Because I watched a whole bunch of soldiers get tied to trees and burned alive by these people. Fully-trained soldiers against, what? A militia of cowboy wannabes?” She shakes her head. “Maybe if we’d brought a bigger force, yeah, we could have taken them. But you and I both know the government will never let you allocate those kind of numbers to taking the Camarilla down.” She pauses, the whole room in the palm of her hand. “Not when they only kill witches.”

And there it is, out in the open at last: the flaw in Alder’s Accords. Rarely acknowledged, but always there, built into the foundations of the Army: just because they live among humans and win their wars for them does not mean they are loved by them. Does not mean that the government won’t sweep the Camarilla under the rug, at least until the death toll gets too high. And by that point, how many of them will be left to fight?

Scylla watches Alder watching Raelle. She can tell that Raelle’s struck a nerve, can _see_ the rage and pain in Alder’s eyes. Alder, Scylla thinks with astonishment, is _weakening_.

Which means they might actually have a shot.

“We have a code to abide by,” Alder says at last. She glances with loathing at Scylla, then back to Raelle. “We don’t pardon terrorists.”

Raelle cocks her eyebrows at her. “No? I think some people might call puppeteering the President of the United States terrorism.”

It’s the last card in their hand, the one they were half-afraid to bring into play. Alder doesn’t think anyone besides the Biddies knows about that, and Scylla takes an unpleasant bit of satisfaction at the way her face blanches.

Alder sits down heavily at her desk. She’s silent for a moment, but when she opens her mouth, it isn’t to accuse or deny. “Very well,” she says through her teeth. “You’ll have your conditions met. _All_ of them.” She shoots Scylla another look. “And in exchange, you’ll agree to go where we tell you to go. You’ll agree to use your gifts in whatever way _we_ see fit.”

This is, Scylla thinks, Raelle’s own version of the Salem Accords. Her life and her freedom so that her people will be safe. It moves her, strangely, to pity for General Alder—for the deal she made with the devil so long ago. She wonders if the General who signed the Accords looked at all like Raelle does now, small and lonely in the middle of the room.

“General Alder.”

Every head in the room turns toward Anacostia, who looks mildly aggravated by the attention. “Private Collar has neglected to mention that she cannot generate a witchbomb _on her own_. The two previous times, she had to maintain physical contact with Bellweather or Ramshorn in order to maintain it.”

“And how is this relevant?” Alder sighs. She’s clearly ready to put this whole affair behind her, and Scylla really can’t blame her for that.

“Only to say that she can’t be deployed on her own,” Anacostia says evenly. “You’re going to need to create a strike team.”

Alder waves her off. “You be in charge of that. Starting now, you have command of our new asset. I’m sure you can put together a suitable—”

“I’ll do it."

Now every eye in the room is on Scylla, including Raelle’s. _Scyl, no_ , she mouths, but Scylla doesn’t look at her. She seeks Anacostia’s eyes and holds them, willing her to understand.

“Half the Army thinks I’m dead,” she says, quietly at first, but building in volume when nobody tries to silence her. “The other half know I’m a traitor. You’ve pardoned me, but I’m still subject to the law. You can’t send me back to Sergeant L’Amara like nothing ever happened.”

Anacostia flicks her eyes toward Alder. “Ramshorn has a point, General,” she says.

“Let me be part of the strike team,” Scylla presses. “I can already help her conduct the witchbomb. And I know necro. I know how the mother mycelium works.” It’s a bit of an exaggeration—nobody really _completely_ knows how the mother mycelium works—but she’s praying nobody calls her on it.

“ _Scylla_ —” Raelle starts to say, desperately.

She’s cut off by, of all people, _Abigail_. “Sergeant Quartermaine, permission to speak?”

Anacostia rolls her eyes. “ _What_ , Private Bellweather?”

“If Ramshorn’s on this strike team, I’m there, too.” She gives Scylla a look, but there’s no dislike in it this time. Only a wary suspicion which, Scylla figures, is a start. “I can conduct the witchbomb, too.”

Tally, from her place among the Biddies, opens and closes her mouth like a goldfish, half-raising her hand nervously.

“It _does_ make sense to have her unit be her strike team.” Anacostia turns to Alder. “General?”

“I don’t care _who_ you pick.” Evidently, Alder has reached her breaking point with the lot of them. “I want you all _out of my office. Now.”_

Anacostia jerks her head toward the door, and Abigail follows. Scylla turns to Raelle with trepidation, but Raelle doesn’t look angry with her. On the contrary—her eyes are soft.

_Thank you_ , she mouths, and Scylla finally, finally relaxes. Allows herself, even, to think what she’d been afraid to hope for: that everything is going to be all right.

Or, if not completely _all right_ , at least they’re together.

“Private Collar.”

They both turn around to see General Alder standing back at attention, her Biddies—including poor Tally, who looks awkward as hell—closing ranks around her.

“See that you don’t forget who has the power here.” General Alder waves them both toward the door. “Dismissed.”

~*~

Anacostia sends them back to Raelle’s old dorm in Circe. “It’s temporary,” she says. “They’ll probably move you somewhere away from the general population once Alder goes public about the strike team.”

Then she _smiles_ at them, and Abigail and Raelle don’t seem fazed by it, but Scylla is so astonished she’s pretty sure her mouth hangs open like a fish. Anacostia doesn’t comment on it, though. “Good work today,” she says. “I’ll send Craven to you as soon as I can.”

Once they’re back in Raelle’s old room, Abigail flops on her bed while Raelle and Scylla situate themselves on Raelle’s narrow lower bunk. Scylla’s tired, strung out from just watching the whole ordeal; she can only imagine Raelle must be even more exhausted, but still she gently pulls Scylla's head into her lap and threads her fingers through her hair.

“Thank you,” she says again. “For what you said back there.”

She doesn’t have to elaborate. Scylla reaches up to cradle the side of her face, and Raelle places her hand over hers.

“Where you go, I go, remember?” she says.

Which of course is when Abigail chooses to glance over, narrowing her eyes.

“You both better hope we’re getting _separate_ rooms,” she says. “Because I am _not_ sharing a bedroom with the PDA train.”

“Always gotta make it weird, Bellweather.”

“Weird is your girl’s thing,” Abigail scoffs. Then, begrudgingly, she adds, “You sort of came through for us there, Necro. If you hadn’t spoken up first—” She breaks off with an embarrassed shrug.

Scylla smiles tentatively back at her. “Don’t know about that,” she says lightly, teasing rather than agitating. “Sounds like you have to work with me now.”

“ _God_ , you’re right.” Abigail looks thoughtful. “We should have a name, maybe. Shitbird Squadron has a nice ring to it.”

“That would make you a shitbird too, Abi.”

“Squadrons are for planes.”

“You are both insufferable,” Abigail declares, but she’s smiling now. “Just remember, when Tally gets back here I won’t be outnumbered.”

“Oh, yeah, because Tally _never_ gives you any trouble…”

They bicker back and forth good-naturedly for a while. Raelle’s fingers against Scylla’s scalp are soothing, and she thinks she must doze for a little while, because she’s woken by the sound of a tap on the door an indeterminate amount of time later.

“Tally,” she hears Raelle breathe, and then she’s all but dumped off Raelle’s lap as she and Abigail race for the door.

Tally comes bursting through the door and lands right in her unit’s arms. Scylla watches with bemusement, and a little pang of longing, as the three of them embrace, laughing and crying on one another in a tight little knot of arms. This, she knows, is a whole part of Raelle’s life she knows almost nothing about—made no effort, really, to know anything about.

And then Tally, of all people, is the one breaking the circle apart, wiping her eyes roughly with the sleeve of her jacket. “Oh, get in here, Scylla,” she says.

Scylla’s not sure, at first, that she’s heard her right. But then Abigail rolls her eyes and says, “Oh, fine, whatever.” And Raelle reaches out for her hand and tugs her in with them.

It’s _weird_ and it’s awkward and she’s pretty sure Abigail is really not into this whole concept at all, but in a strange way, it’s nice. Scylla can’t remember the last time she was surrounded by so many other people who… _tolerate_ her seems like where they’re at right now.

But in the future, who knows?

(She _definitely_ isn’t crying a little, because that would be _insane_.)

Tally pulls away so that she can look the rest of them in the eye. “So,” she says. “Strike team, huh?”

Abigail inclines her head. “Strike team, huh,” she echoes.

“What,” Tally starts to say, then falters. “I mean, like _what_ does that even mean?”

Raelle laughs. She’s still crying a little, crying and laughing at the same time, and Scylla’s heart is so full right now she thinks it might burst.

“Guess we’re gonna find out,” Raelle says. She’s got one arm around Tally and the other around Scylla’s neck; in front of both her sisters, she presses her lips to Scylla’s forehead.

And Scylla—caught up in the arms of the girl she loves and two others who, at least, don’t _hate_ her, with a whole lot of terrible things behind them and a world of uncertain things still to come—is put in mind suddenly of her dream. The beach that was once what she thought of as home. Her father’s voice saying _this time, you’re not alone_.

She’s beginning to think that maybe he was right. Even if—perhaps _especially_ if—it was just a dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I want to thank each and every one of you who left comments and kudos. This was very much a brand new thing for me and I had so much fun with it and am so humbled by all the nice things you had to say.
> 
> Second of all: a lot of you have been asking if I will write more for mfs. The answer to that is a very definite YES, and I’m pleased to announce that a sequel to this fic is in progress. I can’t promise it anytime soon, because I intend for it to be a lot more plot-heavy than morpheus, but it is definitely already in the works. (Unfortunately, jobs and grad school and all that junk are also in the works, so it could be a little while.) Thank you all for all of your encouragement and your kind comments—I wouldn’t have had the stones to make that kind of commitment otherwise.
> 
> Third of all: I’m trying something totally new and different for me—I’m opening my inbox for prompts! I can’t promise I’ll get to them all, but I promise to do my best. Contact me @ vuvalinis on tumblr (or just say hi! i love friends!)

**Author's Note:**

> Special fangz to Hayley who does not watch mfs but read chapter one for me and said "this is so fraught" followed immediately by "where can I stream this." you a real one.
> 
> I'm vuvalinis on Tumblr, come say hi if you're so inclined


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